Hames Chocolates began as a family venture and has been manufacturing chocolates in Lincolnshire for over fifteen years.  The customer base is across the leisure and retail sectors, including high footfall tourism attractions, leisure centres, holiday parks, as well as specialist chocolate shops, chocolate makers, garden centres and department stores.  They manufacture bespoke personalised chocolates and confectionery for both own label and promotional sectors, and work with many food service suppliers.  The operations on site include manufacturing, wrapping, packing, bespoke graphics design, product development and sales.

A very wide range of products are produced including truffles, filled chocolates, chocolate bars, chocolate Neapolitans, private label chocolates, bespoke chocolates, moulded chocolates, hollow chocolate figures, enrobed products, and chocolate assortment boxes.  Seasonal products such as chocolate Easter eggs and advent calendars are also made on site.  There is mix of automated, semi-automated and manual processes used depending on the products and size of production run required.

They claim “we are possibly one of the biggest British chocolate companies you have never heard of”.

Sales have grown strongly in the last 12 months as UK businesses look increasingly to source products from home-grown producers rather than imports.

An initial assessment of the production operations was carried out to identify bottlenecks, effort intensive operations, process flow issues, and where automation could provide business benefit.

Process flow

The sequential equipment to produce many products was distributed around the factory as function of the evolution of the business, extensions of the building, and the space available when the equipment was installed.  This has led to somewhat contorted flows for some products (Figure 1).  For example, currently Neapolitans and bars are produced in the Chocolate Room, moved through Room 4 to Room 1 or Room 2 for wrapping, and can subsequently be boxed in Room 1, 3 or 4.

This segmented flow arrangement also necessitated process buffers of stacked trays of product before and after each machine/process.  This used a substantial amount of floorspace and hindered free flow of movements around the factory.

Improving flow in the factory space would be beneficial before introduction of any further automation and/or cobotics.  The suggested approach would be to group equipment in rooms broadly in the order of use in the generic flow – forming, contact wrapping, boxing so that products would flow from forming through wrapping and boxing towards the warehouse (Figure 2).  This would a generic flow from production in the Chocolate Room through predominantly wrapping/bagging in Room 4, to predominantly boxing in Rooms 1-3.  Moving wrapping machinery to Room 4 would create space in Room 1 for the multipurpose conveyor/table currently in Room 4.  Additionally, moving the equipment used for producing the higher sales volume products to be adjacent, where chocolate would move directly from one machine to the next, would eliminate the need for buffer stacks of product.  However, this would require inline chilling as an alternative to the current manually loaded batch chilling used for most products.

Handling cobotics

A major effort intensive task at Hames is in box folding, both outer cartons and more especially the consumer packaging boxes.  Whilst the magnitude of staff effort put into these tasks would suggest box folding as a target for automation, the wide variety of different shapes and sizes, and often the complexity of folding required would not make it an ideal topic for a first foray into automation for Hames.

Several other tedious and repetitive common tasks were identified on a first pass as potential automation targets.  If automation could be implemented, this would allow staff to move to more stimulating and/or dextrous tasks such as boxing.  Initial assessment of possible tasks for cobotics are:

1. mould placement from trays onto depositor machine infeed belts
2. mould removal from machine outfeed into trays
3. placing of trays of moulded chocolate into racks for manual wheeling to batch chill room
4. demoulding of chilled chocolate into trays or onto belts
5. placement of chocolate items into flow wrappers
6. possibly some placements of wrapped chocolate into consumer packaging
7. carton loading of consumer packaged/boxed products