Flowpacker and cartoner Atlantic Štark

Requirements

Securing tomorrow's production

The story has the potential to become a film: After the First World War, a French soldier decides to settle in Serbia for love – and not just in the romantic sense. He falls for a woman called Theresa, as well as for chocolate, which he begins to make himself according to his own recipe and successfully sells. In doing so, he laid the foundation for the ‘Louit’ chocolate factory, later renamed ‘La Cigogna’, which grew steadily through mergers and changed its name several times – from Soko Štark in the 1960s to Atlantic Štark since 2020, after the Croatian Atlantic Grupa food group had acquired the company in 2010.

The portfolio of Štark – the shortened company name – also became more and more diverse over time. In addition to chocolate, such as the nationally renowned Najlepše želje – Serbian for ‘Best Wishes’ – the company produces biscuits and savoury snacks such as peanut flips. For decades, consumers have also been delighted by a chocolate-covered marshmallow-type dessert treat shaped like a banana. The individually flow-wrapped ‘Bananica’ comes in boxes of different quantities. Equally popular is ‘Citro’, a chocolate-coated jelly confection with a lemon or orange flavour, which is also sold in flowpacks and boxes.

A more efficient and flexible solution was needed because partially manual processes were leading to costly bottlenecks in final packaging. With portfolio growth, it should continue to enable high performance and efficient packaging. However, the catch was that the new packaging line had to be up and running in as little as three weeks in order to resume production as quickly as possible. So how to proceed?

Solution

TLM technology meets robotics

Atlantic Štark was keen to work with Schubert again to automate its Bananica and Citro lines.

The packaging machine manufacturer had previously supplied technology for the compay to Slovenia and Bosnia. In Belgrade, an impressive yet space-saving packaging line was built in just three weeks in 2024.

It comprises four seamlessly connected machines, from primary to tertiary packaging: a TLM Flowpacker with two Flowmoduls, two TLM cartoners and a TLM lightline case packer, not to mention state-of-the-art pick & place robots. Schubert’s solution offers the option of integrating tray packaging technology and an additional case packer in the long term.

The neatly placed chocolate products run on a conveyor belt from where they are packaged.

We didn’t have the robots before. Instead, we had a mechanical feeding system with inherent technical limitations. Now we can work faster and more accurately. Bottlenecks in the packaging process are a thing of the past.

Nenad Ivanović

Project lead, Atlantic Štark

Technical details

Twelve F4 robots gently pick up 850 chocolate products per minute
High-performance Flowpacker reliably flow-wraps two times 425 Bananica per minute
Rapid changeover cartoner for seven formats with filling quantities between 5 and 40 count

A robot arm lifts one of the chocolate products into the feed-chain of the flow module.

Carefully packed

Twelve F4 robots gently pick up the chocolate products arranged in 19 tracks – precisely as the pressure-sensitive Bananica and Citro require – and place them just as carefully into the feed chains of the two Flowmoduls, Schubert’s flow-wrapping machines. Here, Schubert shows its strength in image processing: scanners optically capture the products and check whether they meet the predefined values. Products that do not meet specifications or that show quality defects are not accepted.

The flowpacks, which the Flowmodul then quickly and precisely forms around the products, are brightly coloured in red and orange. The high-performance line reliably packs two times 425 Bananica products per minute. Štark markets its Bananica in boxes of five, ten, 16, 24 and 40 products.

Two red boxes labeled “Bananica” can be seen in the packaging machine.

What makes this so remarkable is that the boxes of five, ten and 16 products are also placed in differently configured transport packaging. As a result, the company has to proceed multilaterally. The cartoners can handle a total of seven formats with filling quantities ranging from five to 40 units. Schubert developed new blanks for all boxes, enabling Štark to save on materials.

The filled and closed boxes will soon be rolling off the line, ready for the next stage of their journey to bulk buyers and food retailers. The case packer is located directly behind the first cartoner, which packs the smaller boxes of 5, 10 and 16. These are fed into the machine on the infeed conveyor, before a grouping chain arranges them in an upright position. The case packer simultaneously denests flat blanks and erects them into carton trays using an A3 erector.

A vacuum transport system takes them to the filling position. The technology removes the desired quantity of grouped products and places them accurately into the provided carton trays. In a further step, the case packer takes lid blanks from the stack, applies glue, folds and glues them around the filled trays – and the shelf-ready packaging is ready to go.