Every robotic packaging equipment company says their machines can handle washdown environments. Very few of them actually design for it.
There's a meaningful difference between equipment that survives washdown and equipment that's built for washdown. The first approach treats water as a threat — something to keep out with seals, covers, and enclosures. The second approach treats water as a given — something the machine will encounter every day, and every surface needs to accommodate.
JLS designs for the second approach. Here's what that means in practice.
Look at the frame structure on most packaging equipment and you'll see rectangular tube or channel steel with flat top surfaces where water pools after washdown. Standing water doesn't just create corrosion risk — it creates a microbial growth environment.
JLS frames are engineered to shed water: round-tube stainless construction as the standard, with open-channel stainless frames available where the application's hygiene requirements call for them. Water can't pool on a round surface — it runs off immediately. This isn't a cosmetic choice. It's a sanitation choice.
Frame construction, access, and cleaning features are specified for the application. JLS offers cleanable construction for secondary-packaging environments and hygienic configurations — minimal harborage points, sanitary fastening, inspectable joints — where the product-contact area and your sanitation program require them.
The principle is the same across every configuration: surfaces you can see, reach, and verify clean — not enclosed cavities you have to trust.
Electrical cables on most packaging machines run through enclosed conduit, cable trays with covers, or flexible cable carriers. These enclosed pathways protect the cables — but they also create linear cavities where water, cleaning chemicals, and organic matter can accumulate.
Flushing an enclosed cable channel is difficult. Verifying it's clean is impossible without disassembly. Over time, these channels become exactly the kind of hidden contamination point that food safety auditors look for.
JLS routes cables through hygienic, open routing wherever the design allows. The cables are accessible, visible, and cleanable along their run — sanitation crews can see the cable routing and clean it the same way they clean every other surface on the machine.
Any horizontal flat surface on a machine is a surface where water will pool. It doesn't matter if the surface is stainless steel — if water sits on it after washdown, it needs to be manually dried or it becomes a contamination risk.
JLS machines use sloped surfaces wherever a horizontal surface would otherwise exist. Panels, guards, mounting plates, and structural members are angled so water drains off under gravity. After washdown, the machine drains itself.
This sounds like a small detail. Multiply it across every surface on a machine that's washed down every day, across every machine on a multi-line installation, and the time savings — and contamination risk reduction — are substantial.
IP69K is the highest ingress-protection rating for water: it certifies that a component withstands close-range, high-pressure, high-temperature water jets in standardized testing. NEMA 4X certifies that electrical enclosures withstand washdown and corrosive environments.
On JLS systems, these ratings are applied where the application requires them — IP69K-rated robots and components on Level 4 primary handling systems like the Talon, and NEMA 4X-rated control enclosures across washdown configurations. The rating describes what the equipment is built to withstand, not a cleaning procedure: always follow the cleaning procedures specified for your supplied equipment and your plant's sanitation program.
One distinction worth understanding: a washdown-rated cover placed over a non-washdown robot doesn't make the system washdown-ready — it makes the cover washdown-ready. JLS engineers the hygiene into the machine itself.
Most robotic packaging competitors start with standard industrial robots — machines designed for automotive, electronics, or general manufacturing environments — and adapt them for food processing. The adaptation typically involves adding stainless steel covers, washdown-rated enclosures, and protective guards.
This approach can work. But it adds cost, adds maintenance complexity, and creates the hidden-cavity problem described above.
JLS designs and builds robotic automation systems for food handling and packaging. The hygienic design principles — water-shedding frames, open cable routing, sloped surfaces, ratings scoped to the application — are built into the system from the first CAD sketch. Nothing is added after the fact to compensate for a design that wasn't right from the start.
This is what "Design for Agility" means at JLS. It's not a tagline. It's a design methodology that starts with the food processing environment and works backward to the machine — not the other way around.
See JLS hygienic design up close
JLS Automation designs and builds hygienic robotic packaging systems at its facility in York, Pennsylvania. To learn more about our approach to sanitary machine design, visit jlsautomation.com or call (717) 505-3800.