Project Overview
The Coconut Cult, a fast-growing maker of clean, coconut-based yogurt, had scaled from a 13,000-square-foot facility to a 300,000-square-foot operation in five years. That growth strained a case-packing and palletizing process that was still largely manual — and manual couldn’t keep pace with new flavor launches, expanding retail distribution, and increasingly complex production demands.
IPM engineered and integrated a fully automated line from the filler through palletizing that preserved The Coconut Cult’s artisanal production standards while unlocking the throughput the brand needed to serve its customers.
Transcript
(0:03) We’re Coconut Colt. We make a completely clean-based coconut yogurt. (0:08) The growth has been insane.
I’ve now been here for five years. When I first joined the company, (0:12) we were in about a 13,000-square-foot facility. Now we’re in a 300,000-square-foot facility.
(0:17) With the growth, some of the biggest challenges really have been sticking to our core. (0:21) Whenever we’ve looked at trying to scale, everybody has changed the product, tried ad cams. (0:26) We’re not doing that.
It’s our core. It’s Coconut Colt. So we want to make sure that the product (0:30) has always been the same.
We never change on the ingredients, and we make it this way. (0:35) Before automation, everything’s been manual. We would hand lid, hand label, hand lid sticker, (0:39) hand tamper bin, and then we put them into cases, pack them, tape them, ship them to stores.
(0:44) We’ve grown significantly from that, but the process is still technically the same, (0:47) and it’s still artisanal. We still use staff. We still need staff because of the way that we make (0:51) it, but the automation just gets us scared.
A lot of the biggest hang-ups that we have in scale is (0:56) getting the product onto a pallet, getting it into the cold storage as fast as possible, (1:00) and with KUKA, we’ve been able to palletize it automatically. (1:05) IPM is a full-service turnkey integration company for food and beverage manufacturers. (1:11) Coconut Colt prior to this line had smaller, slower speed lines.
Both the case packing and (1:18) palletizing portion were, in large part, done by hand, and the necessity for increased capacity (1:24) required a big automated line that could handle higher capacity and more throughput. IPM scope (1:31) started with the filler and then everything downstream of the filler through palletizing. (1:36) In this section, we see the case packing operation and then the case conveyance and (1:42) accumulation into our KUKA palletizing cell behind us.
So the first two IONTEC arms are (1:49) the collation arms to form the layer. They take a single stream of product in and move it (1:55) into rows and columns as needed to form the full pallet layer, and then the QUANTEC arm with a (2:03) vacuum tool picks up that entire layer and places it on the pallet. We’ve utilized Jolene end-of-arm (2:09) tooling for the layer pick tool and then custom fabricated collation brackets for the IONTEC arms.
(2:17) The IONTEC arms were chosen because of their speed. These are very quick movements that (2:22) are necessitated to form the layers, and the QUANTEC arm was spec’d by payload and capacity (2:29) that we needed. We have integrated dozens of KUKAs in the past.
Our controls department really likes (2:34) the KUKA software. We use the conveyor tech software for the layer forming operation. We use (2:40) the FLEXPAL software for the layer pick, and the safe operation tech keeps all the arms (2:46) in safe operation zones.
This is a drastic increase in production capacity for Coconut (2:52) Colt. It will allow them to deploy the resources they have for important jobs throughout the (2:59) operation and allow a lot of the simple tasks to be done by equipment. The goal for us really is (3:05) to get products in the shelves for the customers.
Now we should be 10x-ing, so we should be doing (3:10) 10 times the amount of product per day, per week, per month, per year, so all the customers can have (3:14) as much product as they need. We launch a new flavor every month, and this just means that we (3:18) can get those products not just on our website, but all across different storefronts. We are always (3:24) doing new innovation.
We have all this extra staff to create that, and having all this automation (3:28) means that we can start that innovation. Making automation easier.
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