When soft drinks started being bottled in the new recyclable plastic bottles in Finland, MultiPick order picking expanded from the traditional beverage crates to beverage trays.

At the beginning of the year, the soft drinks industry in Finland adopted new, recyclable plastic deposit bottles. The new bottles brought with them new packaging: instead of the traditional beverage crates, the majority of soft drinks now leave for the stores in trays.

All Finnish breweries already use only recyclable plastic bottles for beverages sold in half liters. For drinks in one-and-a-half liter bottles, Hartwall is using both recyclable plastic bottles and old bottles during the transitional stage. This means that there is an order picking requirement for both crates and trays.

At the Hartwall distribution center in Lahti the MultiPick system now picks both smoothly. The change of system was carried out on a tight schedule, in order to get the drinks into the stores in summer at a normal pace. During the modification work started in spring, the robot grippers were changed and the software was updated to suit the new products.

“The software has been changed so that the new products can be palletized so that the automation systems are able to transport them. At the same time order picking customer-specificity was added, which facilitates the distributor delivering the drinks to the stores,” says Veli-Matti Eerola, Hartwall’s Customer Supply manager.

Hartwall has 12 order picking robots. The changes were made in two stages so that half of the robots were in use the whole time. “The changeover was done first for only a part of the order picking and when that was operational, the change was copied for the other part.

The later modification work was implemented more quickly, since the programs had already been tested.”

More packaging variations

Earlier, soft drinks were bottled in returnable plastic bottles, which were washed at the beverage factory and then reused. Bottles are still returnable, but the new single-use bottles are used as raw material for new bottles. In collaboration with stores, the Finnish brewery industry developed a beverage tray for the new bottles, taking into account the possibility for automated order picking at the design stage. Thus the compatibility of the tray and MultiPick was ensured right from the start.

For the consumer, in practice, the new packaging mostly means the disappearance of crates from the soft drinks shelves.

“You can’t buy products by the tray, but this change has brought about more variations in packaging. Soft drinks are now often sold in packs of four and six.”

 Hartwall is still using the traditional beer crates. According to Eerola, there will be no changes there in the near future. As for soft drinks, there are more changes in the pipeline for MultiPick.

“It’s clear that the traditional crate for one-and-a-half liter bottles will also have to be changed relatively soon. The most demanding part of the changeover has already been done: both types of bottle that were meant for order picking in trays are now included in the order picking system. The rest is mostly fine tuning.”

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