Tasteful Selections’ Bite-Sized Success Automating Baby Potato Packing

Tasteful Selections, located near Bakersfield, CA, is the largest grower, shipper, and packer of bite-sized potatoes in North America. The company first started its robotics automation journey by installing palletizers using Schneider Packaging, a FANUC Approved Systems Integrator. The solution using FANUC palletizing robots has not only boosted efficiencies but also helped to keep Tasteful Selections’ employees safer by reducing the number of accidents and injuries.

As the company increased the speed of the processing lines, manually packing the bags of potatoes in boxes became a bottleneck. The automated solution needed to be food safe and gentle to produce the best quality baby potatoes. Tasteful Selections invested in five FANUC M-3iA Delta robots for case packing that are equipped with Soft Robotics’ mGrip soft gripper.

With the investment in automation, Tasteful Selections has been able to grow very quickly as well as maintain the quality bite-sized potatoes customers and food retailers like Costco have come to love. Plus, this has all been done at an attractive price point.

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Before we had the robotics, everything was done by hand, so for food safety, that’s a little bit of a concern because there’s a lot of hands touching the product. Since we put in the robotics with the soft gripper – you know, it doesn’t eliminate a person, it just moves them to a different role – it allows less human contact. Our philosophy here, in regards to food safety, is we want to make sure that the potatoes people are consuming are the safest that they can be from farm to fork.

Lindsey Mebane Food Safety Manager – Tasteful Selections