Pascal Processing grows thanks to ‘Any Pick - Any Grip’

Pascal Processing preserves food under high water pressure. The company introduced the technique back in 2011, but it has only gained popularity in recent years. The sense of urgency in the food chain to work more safely and sustainably has clearly increased. 

Consumers are often familiar with this preservation technique without realising it: think of bottles of fresh juice or ready-cut fruit in the supermarket, preserved without the use of additives.

Pascal Processing works for a wide range of food producers that do not have sufficient volume to invest in their own preservation lines. As a result, the company processes a large variety of products and packaging formats – from small bottles to pouches and trays. One of the biggest challenges was sorting products after the high-pressure treatment. Once the packages leave the machine, everything is mixed together. Manual sorting is hardly feasible: labour is scarce and expensive, and processing takes too long. The key question was how products could be efficiently organised from this chaos and placed individually so that follow-up steps, such as cooling or drying, become possible. The answer lies in automating this process, which proved essential to further scaling Pascal’s capacity.

The solution

Motis has been developing and building machines for more than 100 years, including for the food sector. What makes the company unique is that it combines engineering and actual production under one roof, and that it devotes more than a quarter of its time to innovation projects. Customers can rely on Motis for the entire process: from idea and design to realisation. For Pascal Processing, Motis developed an innovative pilot setup in which a suction gripper can pick up all packages at once and then release and sort them individually. The project was given the title ‘Any Pick – Any Grip’. Based on coordinates, the system determines which product goes where. This allows processing speed to increase significantly. An important advantage is that products are always returned to the correct position – a bottle, for example, is automatically set down with the cap facing upwards.

Experimentation

What makes the collaboration between Pascal Processing and Motis special? Partly the close proximity of the two companies, but certainly also their shared willingness to experiment. There is no standard solution for this challenge. Instead, the partners work through an iterative trial-and-error process: “A Mikado project that we shape together.”

This project was supported by Next Tech Food Factories, a collaboration between AgriFood Capital and Brainport Development, and was co-funded through an investment by the Eindhoven Metropolitan Region.

nexttechfoodfactories.nl 
agrifoodcapital.nl