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  • Case

    PGG Wrightson Seeds: Automation
    that Transforms Operations

Decoratief element

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 Francis. “We’d always been very hands-on, but it
became impossible to ignore the need to reduce manual handling and lift the
productivity of our cleaning lines.” In 2023, the company commissioned its first
Verbruggen VPM-8 palletizer, integrated with a unique chamber system to handle
multiple products and blends in one flow.

PGG Wrightson Seeds

Efficiency, flexibility, and new opportunities

The results were immediate. Jobs that once took most of the day with one or two
staff members can now be finished in about an hour. In peak tests, the machine ran
at 15 metric tons per hour — faster than the logistics team could remove pallets.
Operators quickly embraced the system, finding it simple to run and highly reliable.
“They can’t keep up with it,” Jason smiles. Compression and squareness of stacks
have delivered further benefits: Containers can now be filled to full height on a single
pallet instead of two pallets high; warehouse capacity has increased by stacking
some products five high instead of four, and damage or slippage in transit has
dropped significantly. All of this has opened up new opportunities in export packing,
shifting the machine from a productivity tool into a catalyst for growth.

PGG Wrightson Seeds

Reliable performance and lasting impact

Commissioning was seamless — ahead of schedule, under budget and without
issues — and the machine has since run with virtually no downtime. “It’s a slick
machine, quiet and efficient, and honestly, it’s quite rewarding just to watching it
work,” Jason says. The success has inspired wider changes across the business.
“We’ve adapted our processes to suit what the Verbruggen can do — not the other
way around.” Plans are already in place for a second machine in a purpose-built
export hub, designed literally around the palletizer. With payback time dropping from
an initial three years to closer to two, Jason is clear in his assessment: “It’s exceeded
our expectations. I’d absolutely recommend Verbruggen. It’s changed the way we
operate, improved the quality of our pallets, and most importantly taken the strain off
our staff.”

Other cases

Luisetti Seeds: Stacking Smarter
with Verbruggen

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

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.

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