Gentle primary placement of fragile baked crackers/cookies into trays and cartons

Across brands like Cheez-It, Club, Town House, Carr's and Pop-Tarts, individual baked pieces leave the oven/cooling line and must be grouped, stacked, and set into shallow trays, slugs, or cartons ahead of secondary packaging. The objects are thin, brittle, low-mass, and dimensionally variable (bake-to-bake size, moisture, and edge integrity differ), so a grasp that is too firm fractures or chips the piece and a grasp that is too loose drops or misaligns the column. This task sits immediately downstream of baking/cooling and upstream of case packing, and at Kellanova's scale it runs continuously at high line speeds across many plants. It is hard for a robot because success depends on modulating grip force to the fragility of each piece and confirming the piece is intact and seated, not just present — a purely vision-guided pick cannot feel a hairline fracture or an over-squeeze. Today this is largely served by specialized vacuum/delta food-handling equipment; AGD's angle is the force-modulated, feel-based handling of fragile, variable product. 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.