Martin Ray Winery is a historic California winery with roots dating back to the 1940s. The company blends tradition with modern winemaking practices, and its production operations run year-round to meet market demand.
Like many wineries, Martin Ray has relied on manual palletizing at the end of the bottling line. Here, two operators worked to stack cases of wine throughout the day.
This manual palletizing process created several operational challenges:
- Repetitive heavy lifting created physical strain and injury risk
- Labor costs were high, with manual palletizing estimated at $100,000 per year
- Hiring and retaining labor for repetitive tasks was becoming more difficult
- Traditional wine industry palletizing systems were large, complex, and expensive
Martin Ray also had a unique palletizing process. Instead of stacking cases on wooden pallets, the winery builds loads directly on the floor and moves them using clamp forklifts.
Martin Ray Winery deploys Robotiq PE20 robotic palletizer
As production volumes increased, the team began exploring robotic palletizing automation to improve efficiency, reduce physical strain on employees, and control labor costs.
To automate the end-of-line process, Martin Ray Winery turned to Robotiq for a robotic palletizer. The palletizing system includes:
- Robotiq Lean Palletizing PE20
- UR20 collaborative robot
- PowerPick 30 vacuum gripper
- Infeed conveyor with gate system
- Safety scanner with fencing and safety relay
- Modified pallet area adapted to their floor-stacking method
In this application, the robotic palletizer operates at a rate of 6–10 picks per minute and can build loads between 67 and 96 inches high, allowing the system to keep pace with the winery’s bottling line. Despite the winery’s unconventional floor-stacking approach, Robotiq engineers evaluated the process and successfully adapted the palletizing robot to support the application.
With limited space on the bottling line, the palletizer also fit within the existing layout without requiring major facility modifications.
Martin Ray’s results so far
With the new palletizer, Martin Ray achieved ROI in 18-months through labor savings and efficiency gains. The robot enabled employees to transition to higher-value roles within the winery.
It also eliminated repetitive lifting of 15 kg wine cases, boosted morale, and had a significant reduction in physical strain on employees. The system could maintain 10 picks per minute and maintain the full bottling line throughput, handling all different SKUs with increasing production volumes.
“Manual palletizing is hard work. With the robotic palletizer, we reduced physical strain on our team while maintaining the pace of our bottling line,” said Bill Batchelor, the COO of Martin Ray Winery.
Additionally, the palletizing robot supports simple changeovers through recipe adjustments, allowing operators to configure the system for different box sizes quickly.