From plastic to carton: why you suddenly need to automate carton feeding in your bottling plant

Why carton is entering the bottling plant and is no longer going away

Let us be clear: this is not a trend that will blow over. The European Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR, Regulation (EU) 2025/40) has been in force since 11 February 2025 and will apply directly in all member states from 12 August 2026. The sharpest part for the beverage sector is in Annex V: from 1 January 2030, a series of single-use plastic packaging formats will simply be prohibited, including disposable grouped packaging such as wrapping and shrink film around consumer multipacks.

Pay attention to the detail that many companies underestimate: it is a ban on the format, not a performance requirement. A perfectly recyclable film with a high recycled content remains prohibited if it falls under that point. So you will not get there with a better film. You have to move to a different packaging concept.

The biggest brewers did not start with this in 2025, by the way, but years earlier:

• One of the largest international brewers eliminated the plastic rings and shrink film around multipacks of cans before 2020 and replaced them with a carton topper. According to its own figures, this removes more than 500 tonnes of plastic from the chain every year, with an investment of tens of millions in new technology and production installations, spread across three breweries.
• Another major brewer chose a completely different route and glues the cans directly together, without a carrier.
• You see the same pattern in soft drinks: major players switched to paper or carton clips and collars around multipacks of cans. We first saw this in pilot markets and then more broadly across Europe.
• In beer and stout, ring carriers and shrink film have been replaced by recyclable carton since 2019.

What these examples have in common: it is always an investment in machines, not just in packaging material. It is no coincidence that those announcements talk about new technology and installations. A line that has run on film for fifty years has to learn to work with carton.

What changes concretely on your line?

On paper, “from film to carto’" sounds like a material change. In the bottling plant it is a process-plant change.

If you work with shrink film, then you work with a roll. That roll hangs in the machine, runs for quite some time, and your operator changes it a few times per shift. It is a consumable with a low frequency and a low weight per operation.

If, on the other hand, you work with carton, then you work with blanks: flat, pre-cut and pre-creased pieces of carton. Think of top clips and cluster carriers for cans, wraparound blanks for outer cases, trays with or without a lid, or a complete outer case.

Those blanks arrive on pallets, in stacks and usually with interlayers between those layers. And the number of blanks your line consumes is directly proportional to your output: one blank per pack. If you run 60 packs per minute, 60 blanks per minute disappear into the magazine of your casepacker or carton loader.

That is the core of the problem. The magazine of such a machine holds a limited supply of blanks. When it runs empty, the machine stops. And the only reason it does not run empty is that someone regularly adds stacks of carton.

[IMAGE: pallet with stacks of carton blanks and interlayers next to a casepacker — alt text: "Pallet with carton blanks and interlayers next to a casepacker in the bottling plant"]

The counterintuitive truth: plastic was operationally simpler

Nobody likes to say this out loud, but it is true: for the bottling plant, film was easier than carton. The switch to carton is better for the environment and for your packaging file, but it does not make your line simpler. It adds a repetitive, physical, high-frequency operation that was not there before.

That is the mistake we regularly see: the carton project is budgeted as a packaging and machine cost, and the carton feeding is “taken along” by the existing operator. On paper, that costs nothing. In practice, it costs two things:

1. Hours. An operator carrying stacks of blanks from a pallet to a magazine is an operator who is not at their line. In a bottling plant where one person monitors several machines, that is not a detail, but the reason why faults are noticed later.
2. Ergonomics. Lifting stacks of carton, bending down to the bottom layer of a pallet, and doing that hundreds of times per shift: that is exactly the type of strain that causes back and wrist complaints. We have been building our Cofeeder for years with exactly that argument: the operator should no longer have to manually put heavy carton into the machine.
3. And then there is the labour market. VDAB's shortage occupations list for 2026 contains 227 occupations, and more than half of the ten biggest shortage occupations are technical positions in industry or construction, with ageing as the structural cause. The question is therefore not only whether you want to put someone on carton feeding. The question is whether you will still find that person in five years.

Why carton feeding is becoming the weakest link in your line

A bottling plant is judged on availability. Your filler, labeller and casepacker are measured down to the second, and your OEE report shows you exactly where you lose output. What such a report usually does not show is that part of your microstops are actually feeding stops: the magazine was briefly empty, or the operator was just on the other side of the hall.

Thirty-second microstops seem unimportant. However, if you multiply them by the frequency with which a magazine runs empty at line speed, and by the number of shifts per week, you arrive at a loss item that is larger than most people expect. With continuously running lines, that is where the business case lies, not in speed gains.

On top of that, a bottling plant rarely has spare space. The area around a casepacker is usually already packed with conveyors, safety systems and operator stations. Adding a conventional industrial robot with fencing is often physically impossible or unaffordable in terms of lost floor space. That is exactly why cobots fit so well here: they are compact, they work safely among people, and they are movable.

What a Cofeeder does in the bottling plant

The Cofeeder is our own feeding robot: a cobot that ensures a continuous supply of the material your other machines need to continue operating. In a bottling plant this concretely means: taking blanks from the pallet and keeping the magazine of your casepacker or carton loader filled.

The technically most difficult part is not the movement. It is handling a stack of carton that is never perfect. Stacks are crooked, blanks stick together, heights vary, and between the layers there are interlayers that must not enter your machine. Our Cofeeder therefore works with pressure sensors: it literally feels its way through the stack, so that it does not damage the carton and still guarantees a constant supply. That is the kind of task a conventional robot struggles with without additional sensor technology.

For bottling plants, we have additionally developed gripping technology that works laterally between the blanks and safely keeps the interlayers separate. And for lines that run so fast that one cell cannot keep up, we place multiple cells that together supply one magazine, so that your feeding never becomes the limiting factor.

The Cofeeder is rarely alone, by the way. It connects seamlessly to our other standard machines: the Cofiller that fills packaging, and the Costacker that palletises the boxes or crates. This way, you cover the complete end of your line with one technology partner.

[LINK: to Cofeeder page]

Why Promation is specialised in this

Carton feeding is not a side activity for us. It is the subject around which we built our product.

• The Cofeeder is a standard machine, not a one-off project. There are by now quite a few of them in production lines in and outside Europe. Some customers ordered ten at once**. That means you are not buying a prototype**: you are buying a concept that has already been proven in practice, with a shorter lead time and a more predictable result than custom work.
• We know the difficulties of carton. Slanted stacks, varying blank quality, interlayers, format changes between brands and pack formats, … Those are the things that cause a feeding project to fail, and that is where our development has been focused in recent years.
• We do everything ourselves. Design, construction, installation, commissioning and maintenance. When there is a malfunction in your bottling plant, you do not call three parties who point at each other.
• We have all gripper variants in-house. Carton is unpredictable: every blank, every carton quality and every stack configuration behaves differently. That is why we simply test it. We take your blanks, apply different gripper concepts to them and see what works. And we do that quickly, physically and without months of study. What you get is not an assumption on paper, but a gripper that we have seen can handle your carton.
• We calculate your speed realistically. With our own tools we calculate the effective cycle time of your feeding system, with dozens of factors playing a role: number of blanks per minute, stack height, gripping time, interlayers, magazine capacity, pallet changes. This way you know in advance whether one cell is sufficient or not, instead of discovering it afterwards on your own line.

Let us also be honest about what a Cofeeder does NOT do

We prefer to sell a correct expectation rather than a nice promise, so: a Cofeeder does not make your line faster. Your output is determined by your filler, not by your carton feeding. Anyone who buys a Cofeeder expecting to run more packs per hour is buying it for the wrong reason.

What a Cofeeder does do is remove a cause of downtime and free up an operator for work where they can actually make a difference. The payback period therefore lies in availability, labour hours and ergonomics, not in speed.

And one more thing: if you run one shift per day on a line with a low cadence and a magazine that only runs empty twice per shift, then the business case is weak. We simply say that too.

How to prepare for this: five things you need to know

If you want to automate carton feeding in your bottling plant, we mainly need these five things to say something meaningful about it:

1. Blanks per minute at maximum line speed: this determines whether one cell is sufficient.
2. Formats and format changes. How many different blanks do you run and how often do you change? Changeover should be part of the design, not a work-around afterwards.
3. Pallet configuration. Dimensions, stack height, and whether interlayers are used.
4. Available space around the casepacker, including the pallet supply route.
5. Weight of the blanks. The weight per blank and per stack that must be picked up at once determines the payload of the cobot and the gripper concept. This is the factor that is most often estimated incorrectly.

Conclusion: the packaging is fixed, the feeding is not yet

The switch from plastic to carton in the bottling plant is no longer a choice. The PPWR will remove film around multipacks from the market by 2030 and the major brewers have been switching for years. What has not yet been decided in many companies is how that carton gets to the machine. As long as the answer is "an operator with a stack of blanks", you are trading a packaging problem for an availability and ergonomics problem.

You now know why carton is entering your line, why the feeding becomes the weak link in the process and what a cobot such as our Cofeeder can change about that, including what it does not solve.