Anyone who’s eaten a classic Hershey’s bar knows how much milky goodness this candy maker packs into a little square of chocolate. The company manages a similar feat with its newly reconfigured palletizing room, packing lots of powerful machinery into a tiny corner of its production facility.

When Hershey engineers automated the palletizing room last summer, they arranged four palletizers, many feet of conveyor, a transfer car and an automatic stretch wrapper—enough equipment to automatically unitize 40 loads per hour—into just 7,000 square feet of space.

Here’s how the operation works.

Cartons of Hershey’s candy from the plant’s many packaging lines merge onto one of four conveyor lines. As those conveyor lines enter the palletizing room, scanners read the bar codes on the boxes they carry.

The scanners communicate with air-operated pushers that divert the cartons down infeed conveyor lanes toward the correct palletizer. (Any misread cartons continue to what employees call “the jackpot lane” for manual handling.)

The smallest cartons are conveyed to a conventional fixed palletizer that neatly unitizes 663, 6.5-inch cartons onto a paperboard slip sheet. The unitized loads are then conveyed to an automatic stretch wrapper. After the loads are wrapped, an automatic print-and-apply system adds a shipping label. A lift truck then picks up the finished loads and places them in the staging area to await shipping.

Larger boxes are conveyed to one of three robotic palletizers. Vacuum-powered grippers allow the robots to handle a variety of carton sizes and load configurations.

Unitized loads leave the robotic palletizers on one of seven output conveyors. A laser-positioned transfer car picks up loads one at a time and carries them to a conveyor line feeding the automatic stretch wrapper. Loads are then wrapped, labeled and moved to the staging area.