KUKA robots ensure success for family mill

French flour for baguettes, flatbreads and cookies

Bourgeois – this name stands for flour of the highest quality since 1895. "We have been operating as independent millers for four generations," explains General Manager Julien Bourgeois. For 80 years, the company’s headquarters have been located in Verdelot, 80 kilometers east of Paris. Conventionally grown and organic flour from Moulins Bourgeois is exported to Germany, Norway, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China, and Brazil, among others.

In the 2010s Moulins Bourgeois had a new mill built, with improved hygiene precautions and almost double the production capacity. But shortly afterwards it became apparent that a new regulation in France would present the company with further challenges. The regulations were intended to reduce the physical strain on mill employees. From now on, flour sacks were allowed to weigh a maximum of 25 kilograms. Julien and David Bourgeois, the fourth generation to run the family business, needed a solution.

From hard physical labor to a fully automated distribution center

"We had to switch from 40-kilogram flour sacks to 25-kilogram flour sacks," Julien Bourgeois reports. "This was good news for our employees because it reduced the heavy physical labor. But we had to practically double the number of sacks we were loading into our trucks every day from 7,000 before. That was completely impossible." 

This was because six employees had previously been responsible for palletizing and loading the flour sacks. This hard physical work could not be accelerated at will. In order to protect the team from overload and to be able to continue to fulfill all orders, the company decided to invest in a fully automated distribution center. The employees, meanwhile, kept their jobs – today, on the loading deck, they ensure that each sack arrives in the right truck and is safely stowed there.

Fast and successful

In 2014, the starting signal was given for the 100 percent automated "goods-to-truck" solution with five KUKA robots. The new distribution center opened in September 2015. Order preparation is completely automated – from the time the pallets enter the warehouse to the time the sacks are transported to the trucks. The five depalletizing robots from KUKA handle the entire order picking process – the system has a processing capacity of 2,000 sacks per hour. In the process, the bags are pre-sorted so that they arrive in the truck in the order that matches the delivery route.

The family business delivers up to 170 tons of flour every day. Annual sales increased from 40 million euros in 2015 to 50 million euros in 2020, and the Bourgeois brothers are pleased to have 150 satisfied employees and one of the most efficient and modern flour production facilities in Europe. "We have managed to load 60 percent more sacks of flour and reduce the risk of musculoskeletal diseases and injuries to our employees as a result of the changeover," said Julien Bourgeois. "As a company, we’ve grown, have much greater demand and therefore more employees overall than before."