Like everyone else in the baking industry, ISBs are dealing with labor shortages due to veteran employees retiring, a lack of new workers to replace them and ever-increasing real estate price increases, said Jamie Bobyk, marketing manager for Apex Motion Control.

Technology that optimizes workflow and safety, helping ISBs meet many of these challenges, has been around for years, Bobyk added. What’s new now is that many retailers and other companies that have a general knowledge of robotic automation are ready to begin integrating it into their future plans.

Apex’s Baker-Bot Decorating Station is one such high-tech solution, whose compact size is perfect for ISBs with limited space.

“It’s a standalone cobot that’s equipped with a dual product platform that allows you to decorate two cakes repeatedly,” Bobyk said.

After one cake is decorated, the decorating arm moves to the second cake while you remove the first cake and place another one ready to be decorated. That process can be repeated all day, every day. It’s easy to clean and use, it’s safe and it’s easy to change over icing as needed.

Apex’s founder and president, Rob Antonides, created the first industrial robotic decorating system, a single cobot decorator.

The latest evolution of the line, Bobyk said, is the Baker-Bot Quad, a multi-bot modular system with integrated conveyor that’s capable of base icing, bordering, writing, drizzling and creating artistic rosettes at an average pace of 10 cakes per minute.

In addition, Apex’s vision-based system for robotic decorating can auto-detect irregularities with cakes, whether they’re round, rectangular or have uneven surfaces.

The robotic decorating arms automatically adjust to each individual cake, much like a human would, as the cakes move down the conveyor.

“It’s very intuitive, and it learns with experience,” Bobyk said. “Again, much like a human would.”

This article is an excerpt from the December 2024 issue of Supermarket Perimeter. You can read the entire Bakery Decorating feature and more in the digital edition here.