Heemskerk Fresh & Easy is a pioneer in product development for a healthy lifestyle. The company supplies up to 4 million fresh convenience products to retailers and fast food chains worldwide every week. Due to the growing demand for vegetarian, minimally processed food, Heemskerk has expanded its operations and now offers more than 400 products such as fresh salads, ready meals in cartons and pre-cut vegetables and fruit.

Robot solution

Due to its strong expansion, Heemskerk was faced with the challenge of just-in-time deliveries to supermarkets. Perishable foods generally only have a very short shelf life of three to four days. The existing manual picking system was no longer sufficient for fast delivery. Added to this was the lack of qualified workers. These conditions prompted Heemskerk to invest in a robotic automation solution from ABB - to optimize the speed and flexibility of supplying the supermarkets with optimized production processes and shorter lead times. The robot solution enables rapid adaptation to different customer requirements and delivery quantities.

At the start of the product flow in the picking area is a four-axis IRB 660 from ABB, which picks the boxes containing orders for a particular supermarket and places them on a conveyor belt. The crates then enter the picking zone, where six six-axis IRB 6700 robots positioned on a rail pick up the crates and place them in the sorting compartments intended for this supermarket. Two further IRB 6700 robots, positioned on the other side of the picking zone, consolidate the picked crates into stable, mixed and high stacks. These crates are then picked up by another four-axis IRB 660, which places them on trolleys that can be transported directly to the supermarket.

Robust solution

This form of picking makes the solution more robust, as it can seamlessly process an endless variety of orders - a concept that is very useful for the daily changing volume orders of the fresh produce industry. Heemskerk handles more than 60 large picked deliveries every day. While the system processes over 800,000 boxes each week, it can handle double or even triple that volume without requiring any changes to the process. Thanks to the ABB robotic solution, the dwell time of fresh produce in the supply chain has been shortened, extending shelf life and minimizing waste.

"The robotic system helps us by supporting our very fast production and picking process. This means that 75 percent of the products processed today will be in the retail stores tomorrow,'' emphasizes Peter van Duijvenbode, Operational Director of Heemskerk Fresh & Easy.