Nakhonluang Rice Factory: A Valuable Partner

PGG Wrightson Seeds is New Zealand’s largest seed producer, supplying a diverse portfolio of grasses, vegetable seeds, forage brassica’s and peas. Each year, its South Island sites process a significant tonnage of seed, with Ashburton handling the bulk of the cleaning and packing. Until recently, palletizing was a labor-intensive job, done by hand — increasingly challenging as staff aged and workplace injuries became more common. “It was our first serious step into automation,” says Operations Manager Jason Fran...

At the Nakhonluang rice factory in Thailand, Verbruggen’s palletizing solutions have helped transform operations. Boosting efficiency, reliability, and automation across the packaging process.

Founded in 1932, Luisetti Seeds is a family-owned business operating over two sites on the Canterbury plains of New Zealand: with its head office in Rangiora and a main seed-cleaning facility in Ashburton.. Specializing in ryegrass — which makes up about half of its annual cleaning volume by weight — the company needed a palletizing solution that could handle bulky products, different bag sizes, and high throughput. “We’d looked at robotic claw arms in the past, but we found that humans could stack ryegrass bett...

Lion Foods, a subsidiary of TOP The Onion Group, produces crispy baked onions for popular brands and private labels, accounting for 80% of crispy onion sales to Dutch supermarkets. The company used to stack everything manually, but now has five Verbruggen palletizing machines delivering neat, stable stacking results. The fleet will soon include three more at another site. “When I first arrived in 2010, everything was stacked manually,” says in-company training provider Marc van der Weele.