Deposit deformable sandwich fillings onto bread bases

On Greencore's high-volume sandwich lines (764m food-to-go units in FY25), the core assembly step is placing fillings - sliced cooked meats, cheese slices, salad leaves, tomato slices, egg/mayo bound mixes - evenly across a bread base before lidding. The objects are limp, wet, sticky, fragile and variable in geometry, and they tend to cling together in stacks. The task sits mid-line, downstream of bread de-nesting and upstream of closing/cutting/packaging, and is one of the most labour-intensive manual steps in the operation. It is hard to automate because a single limp slice must be peeled off a stack, carried without folding or doubling, and laid conformally onto a soft base without tearing it - all at line rates measured in tens of units per minute per lane. We identified this through our own research; we have not confirmed the specifics with the customer directly. This page is our researched read — a starting point for that conversation.