Robots earn their crust in German bakery
6 February 2025 
A mid-sized German bakery has installed six industrial robots to help it cope with expanding demand and to improve the efficiency of its operations.
The family-run Malzers bakery supplies the Ruhr region of Germany with fresh rolls, breads and cakes. It has recently enlisted the help of six industrial robots – an unusual move for a smaller bakery.
“Although automation has already arrived in the bakery industry, the use of robots is not yet the standard for medium-sized companies,” explains Peter Dunschen, founder and MD of Warburg-based ADM Automation & Engineering, which was responsible for the installation. “Malzers bakery is a pioneer in this field.”
ADM has been designing and programming automation systems for more than 20 years, mainly for large bakeries and companies operating in the transport, packaging and container glass sectors.
As Malzers expanded – it now supplies more than 150 stores daily – it needed to optimise its production processes. MD Christian Scherpel and technical manager Björn Hennig, turned to Dunschen, who recommended using robots.
The robots have been applied initially to a production line that loads baking trays and sheets automatically with pieces of frozen dough. Previously, this was done manually by Malzers employees. The trays go into the production process at the company’s main site, while the sheets are delivered to branches, where the dough is baked on site to make fresh products.
A step into the unknown
With the Malzers order, ADM was taking a step into unknown territory. “We only started mechanical engineering in 2022, when we took over the employees from another company,” Dunschen reports. “The plant for the Malzers bakery was our masterpiece – the first to be implemented in our newly-built premises!”
ADM proposed that robots take over three steps – depalletising, inserting baking paper, and loading pieces of dough onto trays or sheets.
After an employee moves a trolley loaded with trays or sheets to the cell, a handling robot then places them onto a conveyor belt. One of Malzers’ requirements was that there should be no interruption when changing the trolleys. ADM chose a six-axis Yaskawa robot and positioned it centrally in front of the conveyor, allowing the trolleys to be docked onto the belt from both sides.
Once one side has been depalletised, a safety fence is raised, and the robot turns to the trolleys on the other side. Employees remove the empty trolleys and replace them with full ones. The robot picks up 400 trays, or 1,000 sheets, every hour (two per cycle) and places them on the belt. The trays are then sucked in and the sheets clamped.
The central positioning and the size of the trolleys required a robot with a relatively long reach and large payload capacity – the gripper alone weighs around 90kg. With a payload capability of up to 120kg and a working range of up to 3m, Yaskawa’s Motoman GP180-120 proved ideal for the restricted space between the trolley and belt.
Coded carts
A five-axis Motoman MPK2F robot then places the baking paper into position. Depending on whether it is a tray or sheet, a different paper format is needed, so the paper carts are coded accordingly. The gripper has a suction device suitable for both types of paper, so no set-up time is needed. When a paper cart is empty, the robot switches automatically to the next one, and the first one can be refilled.
The MPK2F is a compact, high-speed pick-and-place robot with a payload of 2kg and a reach of 900mm. “Previously, we experimented with a three-axis Delta picker and a Motoman GP7,” Dunschen recalls. “But only the MPK2F was able to satisfy our speed requirement of 1,000 sheets per hour.” The robot was developed specifically for use in the food industry and has a special washdown paint finish.
In the last step, four four-axis Motoman MPP3H robots come into play. These machines load the trays or sheets with dough products arriving on a second conveyor belt from the opposite direction. Each food-certified robot can carry out 80 picks per minute – made possible by the high torque of the fourth axis, known as the “handwheel axis”.
The different loading configurations presented a challenge. “The stores order different quantities of different rolls, and we had to take this into account,” Dunschen explains. The Delta pickers receive the loading configuration per tray via a computer interface, allowing each store’s requirements in terms of the variety and number of rolls, to be met. At the end of the process, the trays and sheets are loaded manually onto trolleys, and prepared for baking or delivery to stores.
When the time came for the installation to undergo its acceptance trial, Dunschen admits that he and his team were a little nervous. But after two hours it was clear that Malzers’ requirements were being exceeded. Instead of the specified 8,000 dough pieces per hour, the line was processing 9,000. “Since then the production line has run smoothly,” Dunschen reports.
Both Malzers and ADM see further potential for automating other parts of the bakery. For example, robots could insert the loaded trays or sheets into the trolleys, or do the preparatory work – removing the dough pieces from bags. “We have already talked about this, but we haven’t thought of a concrete concept yet,” says Dunschen.
Meanwhile, ADM is already working with another bakery to automate its production activities.
