Robot's award recognition

Bondholder Millitec's state-of-the-art robot has been crowned as the winner of the British Sandwich Association New Product Award at the Sammies 2020.

igene, which officially launched earlier this year, was primarily designed to help make sandwiches on an industrial scale. The delta robot is designed to emulate the size of a human on a production line and is completely portable, making it more flexible to production change requirements.

On winning the award, Managing Director, Richard Ledger said: “We’re thrilled to have won the New Product Award for our hygienic, portable robotics. The project has been 2 years in the making, with a dedicated team of designers and software engineers working around the clock to help bring this concept to life.”

Committed to the long-term development of automation and artificial intelligence in food processing, Ledger said: “This is just the start of the journey for this type of robot – we’re continuously developing both software and hardware to ensure maximum flexibility to the customer. When we applied for the award, igene was still newly launched and was initially only capable of placing bread onto sandwiches – now, using state-of-the-art machine vision systems, it can select ingredients and position them in place, place cut sandwiches on top of one another and soon it will even put them into a packet!”

Millitec has seen year on year growth since launching in 2005 and in late 2019 moved to a new £1.2 million facility in Draycott, Derbyshire in anticipation of high industry interest in the igene robot.

The award will be celebrated at the BSA Industry Dinner later this year.