De-nesting and placing brittle biscuits/crackers into tray cavities or stacks

Across Mondelēz's biscuit and cracker lines (Oreo, Ritz, LU, Tate's), baked pieces must be lifted from a conveyor or oven discharge and arranged into slug stacks, tray cavities or flow-wrap in-feeds without breakage. Biscuits are brittle and friable — edges chip, sandwich cookies shear at the cream layer, and crackers fracture under point loads — and dimensions vary slightly with bake. The task feeds downstream wrapping/cartoning and is central to the categories that make up roughly half of company revenue; Mondelēz is in a multiyear program to modernize and in-house more US biscuit production and mixed-pack (cookie/cracker) packaging. The robotic difficulty is high-rate gentle picking and precise nesting/stacking of fragile, slightly variable objects where a force-blind grasp crushes product and a misaligned placement jams the stack or wrap, all while handling crumbs and surface fragility in a hygienic environment. 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.