Ground meat. Sausage logs. Pet food rolls. Cookie dough. These products all share a common shape — the chub — and a common problem at the end of the line: they're still being packed into cases by hand.
Walk through most meat and poultry plants today and you'll find the grinding, stuffing, and clipping operations running at full speed. Then you'll reach the case packing station — and there's a crew of workers manually placing chubs into corrugated cases, one at a time. It's slow, physically demanding, and hard to staff.
So why hasn't automation solved this?
Chubs are cylinders. Put a cylinder on a flat conveyor belt and it does what cylinders do — it rolls. That movement makes it nearly impossible for a conventional pick-and-place system to acquire the product reliably. The robot reaches for a chub and it's already shifted position. Throughput drops. Misfeeds climb. Operators end up babysitting the machine instead of doing higher-value work.
This is why most food packaging automation has focused on flat or rigid products first — trays, pouches, cartons, clamshells. Those shapes sit still on a conveyor. Chubs don't.
Even if you solve the rolling problem, chub packing environments present a second challenge. Ground meat and sausage processing areas are wet, cold, and subject to aggressive washdown protocols. Equipment in these zones needs to withstand demanding cleaning — every shift, every day.
Standard secondary packaging equipment isn't designed for this. Most case packers on the market are built for dry environments and retrofitted with covers or guards for use in food plants. That approach creates water traps, hard-to-clean cavities, and sanitation headaches that defeat the purpose of automation.
Automating chub case packing requires solving both problems at once: product stability and cleanable design. The equipment needs to control the chub so it can't roll during picking, and it needs to survive the washdown environment without harboring bacteria or corroding.
At JLS, we addressed the stability challenge with the V-TRACK pick conveyor — a proprietary V-shaped track that cradles each chub and keeps it from rolling during picking. The vision system sees exactly where each chub sits, and vision-guided delta robots with VOB vacuum tooling acquire each chub cleanly. Tooling and configuration are selected for the chub sizes, weights, and case patterns in your application.
For hygiene, we didn't retrofit an existing machine. The Osprey CL was designed from the ground up with cleanable stainless-steel construction, NEMA 4X-rated control enclosures, continuous welds, and an open frame architecture that's built to get wet.
Chub packing has stayed manual not because automation doesn't make sense — the labor costs, the repetitive strain injuries, the throughput limitations all point clearly toward automation. It stayed manual because the equipment didn't exist to handle a rolling product in a washdown environment.
That's changed. The Osprey CL loads chubs into cases at production rates, in single- and multi-head configurations sized to your line — in the same wet, cold environment where your grinder and stuffer already operate.
If your packers are still keeping up with your stuffer by hand, it's worth a conversation about what's possible now.
JLS Automation designs and builds hygienic robotic packaging systems at its facility in York, Pennsylvania. To learn more about automating chub case packing, visit jlsautomation.com/osprey-cl or call (717) 505-3800.