Thanks to the Caribbean tourist trade, there’s strong demand for bottled drinking water on the island of Puerto Rico. With sales growing at a steady clip, Cristalia Premium Water recently found it was having difficulty keeping up with that demand.

The company decided to explore automatic palletizing as a way to manage growth at its bottling plant in Ponce, Puerto Rico. But director of manufacturing operations Tom Terrell knew the 20,000 square foot facility only had room to automate palletizing on one production line.

Of the facility’s four production lines, the 1-gallon-jug line was the obvious choice. One-gallon jugs are the plant’s biggest producer. What’s more, cases coming off that line weigh 27 pounds, creating some mighty heavy lifting for employees tasked with manually stacking those cases onto pallets.

Terrell and his team chose a low-speed palletizer (FKI Logistex, 877-935-4564, www.fkilogistex.com) with a compact footprint that suited their needs. For a capital investment of less than $100,000, they installed the palletizer on the 1-gallon-jug line and, according to Terrell, started earning a return on their investment in less than six months.

“With the new palletizing system, we reduced labor costs by 25% and increased our total volume by 20%,” he says. “The most important gain came from continuous uptime and uninterrupted shifts. Now the line never stops.”

The automatic palletizer gives Cristalia the ability to palletize at rates up to 30 cartons per minute. The machine includes a 10-pallet-capacity automatic pallet dispenser.

An existing line shaft roller conveyor brings cases from the production line to the palletizer infeed. The machine forms 16-case layers, with each case containing three 1-gallon jugs.

The palletizer builds pallet loads on chain conveyor. When a load is complete, it is automatically discharged and the pallet dispenser automatically feeds another pallet into position for the next load.