The Material Handling Blog

Imagine a relay race in which your team has executed every handoff perfectly, but the final runner stumbles just before the finish line. All that effort and strategy are lost in the last few seconds. Many warehouses invest in picking, sorting, and storage automation yet leave palletizing as a manual process. However, inefficient palletizing creates bottlenecks, increases labor costs, and limits throughput, ultimately holding back the full potential of your operation.

Leaders in food production, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and other temperature-sensitive industries don’t need to be convinced of the complexity inside cold and temperature-controlled storage facilities. The constraints are familiar - freezing or chilled environments, limited time workers can safely spend in cold zones, high energy costs, and strict standards for product handling. What’s less obvious is how many of these challenges are tied directly to palletizing. Whether you’re moving finished goods into storage or staging for outbound shipping, the way pallets are handled in cold environments has a direct impact on throughput, workforce safety, and product quality. That’s why cold storage requires a different approach to palletizing. One that reduces exposure, automates movement, and keeps your operation running smoothly.

For fruit growers and packers, every season brings pressure: move product quickly, protect quality, and meet demand without breaking the line or damaging the fruit. Whether you're building a new facility or enhancing an existing one, designing the right accumulation system is key to keeping palletizing operations running smoothly.

Once companies decide to automate their warehouses or manufacturing facilities, choosing the technology can be an exciting step in the process. Which leading-edge equipment could be implemented? The possibilities seem almost endless.

From orchard to market: See how advanced automation and data analytics from RH Brown, now proudly part of Bastian Solutions, transformed a fourth-generation family business. Wenatchee, Washington, may be known as the "Apple Capital of the World," but is also renowned for its bountiful sweet cherry orchards. McDougall & Sons, a fourth-generation family-owned business, has been growing, processing, and distributing cherries and other tree fruits for decades. With Washington state producing millions of pounds of cherries annually, meeting the demand for fresh and high-quality sweet cherries is no small achievement. McDougall & Sons faced the challenge of increasing processing rates, managing peak capacity, and balancing production across multiple lines. To meet the demand for customers in both domestic and export markets, they partnered with RH Brown. Their collaboration led to significant improvements through advanced material handling automation, warehouse control software, and data analytics, transforming McDougall & Sons' operations and efficiency.

For many distribution centers, unloading trailers and placing inbound product on pallets can be very labor-intensive. There are often hundreds to thousands of boxes in each trailer and these boxes can be large, heavy and hard to reach meaning most reaching, lifting and moving of boxes is done manually. Additionally, the environment inside the trailer can range from cold to extremely hot making it, at times, particularly uncomfortable. As a whole, finding and keeping labor for this essential work often presents a problem. Introducing the right automation to your palletizing operations can address labor availability challenges while also improving margins, throughput and operational flexibility.

Looking to optimize flow of cartons from two production areas and reduce overall labor requirements, Custom Apple Packers turned to RH Brown for automated sortation and palletizing solutions. We were able to design an integrated system that increased throughput to meet the customer’s requirements, while utilizing existing accumulation lanes.

Compact and scalable automation options are trending across consumer-facing markets like grocery and retail but when it comes to manufacturing, leading advanced technologies are also proving to be foundational for future growth.

Analyzing the tasks, rates and capabilities can help not only maximize the robotic system but also help reduce the need for ancillary equipment and additional investments, creating a more streamline operation.

Palletizing and depalletizing with collaborative robots just made a huge step forward. These easy-to-integrate solutions can handle a range of product sizes and styles while eliminating the need for safety fencing and requiring minimal floor space.