Interpack 2026: A meaty challenge

Hygienic packaging of non-standardized meat products

Bruchsal/Düsseldorf – Up until now, the production of Nuremberg sausages has involved putting them into the packaging machine by hand, one by one. To increase the dependability, process reliability, and cost-effectiveness of sausage production, a team of machine building experts has designed an automatic pick-and-place machine that includes stainless steel drives and automation technology from SEW‑EURODRIVE's MOVI‑C^® portfolio.

Meat products are subject to the strictest of hygiene standards. The machinery used to handle them must be free of dead space, have smooth surfaces, and be easy to clean. The collaborative partnership between the custom machine designers at mb bergmann, the stainless steel specialists at Eberhardt, and a team of drive and automation experts from SEW‑EURODRIVE has produced a bespoke machine with a hygienic design for packaging non-standardized meat products.

The machine has a duplex design with two lines that are mirror images of each other and both have several conveying lanes. To even out the unsorted product streams that arrive at the machine, the sausages are first distributed between the lanes via two distribution chutes. A step conveyor then makes sure the sausages are correctly oriented and separates them precisely in each lane. A metering belt ensures each step has exactly one sausage. A camera detects products that are damaged or too curved. Sausages that don't have the correct length, geometry, or contour are removed.

A second step conveyor then takes the inspected sausages to an indexing conveyor that makes sure they are correctly positioned and spaced so they can be picked up by the gripper. At the end of each line, a special vacuum gripper picks up 56 sausages at a time, which equates to four of the traditional 14-packs. Given that the gripper station covers both lines, it picks up a total of 112 sausages at a time. This is equivalent to an output of 1000 sausages per minute.

SEW‑EURODRIVE supplied the drive and control technology for the sausage pick-and-place machine. Thanks to the MOVI‑C^® modular automation system, planetary, right-angle, and helical gear units as well as stainless steel asynchronous motors and servomotors can be combined as necessary to suit the exact installation situation and dynamics/hygiene requirements. PSH../CM2H.. servo gearmotors, in the form of fanless stainless steel gearmotors in a hygienic design (IP69K), are used for distribution and indexing, while right-angle gear units with KES../TENV.. asynchronous motors are utilized for the step and metering conveyors. MOVIDRIVE^® control cabinet inverters are used for closed-loop control and MOVI‑C^® CONTROLLER type UHX65A for open-loop control.

Visitors to Interpack 2026 can head to Stand C49 in Hall 6 to see the wide-ranging possibilities of SEW‑EURODRIVE's MOVI‑C^® modular automation system for themselves.