FDBusiness.com

Schubert successfully exhibited at the IBIE, the “International Bakery Industry Exposition” for the first time ever. During its IBIE debut, Schubert attracted major attention by premiering its lightline Flowpacker to the international baking industry. The Schubert booth was one of the trade show highlights.

Large to medium sized baked goods manufacturers were curious and excited to learn more about Schubert’s highly flexibly and efficient robot-based automation solutions. Besides its technology, Schubert also presented its strong service portfolio for customers across North America and around the world.

The baked goods industry plays a major role in the strategic course development of the German packaging manufacturer Schubert. The IBIE was an ideal platform for Schubert to present its broad portfolio of innovative and intelligent components for single-source automation systems to gently and efficiently package baked treats. The compact, robot-based packaging line can be ideally customized and configurated to meet every customer’s and product’s unique requirements. Schubert’s top-loading machines (TLM) offer the right solution for every packaging challenge in the baking industry. This involves especially the gentlest handling of highly sensitive products without leaving behind any traces, marks or even breaking the baked delights.

Meeting the baker’s needs

“By exhibiting our lightline Flowpacker we were able to demonstrate the perfect solution most visiting bakers were looking for: a high-performance picker line combined with our Flowmodul flow-wrapping component, that ensures most gentle and facile product handling,” outlines Hartmut Siegel, Chief Executive Officer of Schubert North America. In addition to that, the machine’s space saving design was quite impressive. The exhibited packaging line will be installed at the Canadian baked goods manufacturer “La Petite Bretonne”, a manufacturer delicate baked and chocolate filled croissants, Danish pastries and cookies.

The system is equipped with four pick & place robots. The robots can handle up to 280 products per minute depending on the characteristics such as size, weight, shape and condition (e.g. filled or fragile) of the packaged goods. During the Baking Industry show, the machine packaged live up to 250 double stacked 3D printed cookies in 125 flow packs, each consisting of four cookies. Serge Bohec, the founder of La Petite Bretonne and happy owner of the exhibited machine, proudly visited Schubert’s booth each day during the show. He was very enthusiastic about “his” new machine being in action: “This single-source solution by Schubert is currently the best automated system to package pastries into flowpacks. I am super excited to soon put the system into operation at my Blainville plant.” The machine will be deployed to package different-sized chocolate-filled croissants and various other products.

Scoring points with strong service portfolio

Besides demonstrating its technological competency, Schubert also shared information about the latest developments at its North American company locations: its Headquarters in Charlotte (North Carolina) and the two further bases in Dallas (Texas) and Toronto (Ontario, Canada). Most visitor’s interest was particularly aroused by Schubert’s expanded service portfolio in North America. Schubert has almost doubled its North American service team over the past two years to even better support its customers across the continent.

Hartmut Siegel, Chief Executive Officer of Schubert North America, summarizes: “The IBIE clearly emphasized that there is a remarkable potential of growth for Schubert within the baking industry in North America. And even though we are not yet as popular in this particular industry as we are in many others, we’ve successfully demonstrated how our packaging systems represent the ideal solution to many end-of-line challenges, bakers face across the North American continent. Schubert’s TLM packaging machines meet all requirements as they are efficient, highly flexible, space-saving and especially easy to operate. That is why participating in the IBIE show was definitely the right decision and crucial for our further development in the North American market.”