Every robotic packaging equipment company says their machines can handle washdown environments. Very few of them actually design for it.
There's a meaningful difference between equipment that survives washdown and equipment that's built for washdown. The first approach treats water as a threat — something to keep out with seals, covers, and enclosures. The second approach treats water as a given — something the machine will encounter every day, and every surface needs to accommodate.
JLS designs for the second approach. Here's what that means in practice.
Look at the frame structure on most packaging equipment and you'll see rectangular tube or channel steel. These profiles have flat top surfaces where water pools after washdown. Standing water doesn't just create corrosion risk — it creates a microbial growth environment. Bacteria colonize in standing water faster than on dry surfaces.
JLS machines use round tube frames throughout. Water can't pool on a round surface — it runs off immediately. This isn't a cosmetic choice. It's a sanitation choice that eliminates thousands of potential pooling points across the machine structure.
Welded joints are standard in equipment manufacturing because they're fast and inexpensive to produce. But in food processing environments, welds create problems.
A weld bead has an irregular surface — micro-crevices where bacteria can harbor and cleaning chemicals can't penetrate. The heat-affected zone around a weld changes the metal's grain structure, making it more susceptible to corrosion. And once a weld is made, the joint can't be disassembled for inspection. You're trusting that the interior of the joint stays clean — without being able to verify it.
JLS uses bolted construction. Every structural joint can be disassembled for inspection and thorough cleaning. The bolt interfaces are designed for sanitary connection — no crevices, no inaccessible cavities. It takes more engineering and more precision to build a machine this way, but the result is a structure that can be verified clean, not just assumed clean.
Electrical cables on most packaging machines run through enclosed conduit, cable trays with covers, or flexible cable carriers. These enclosed pathways protect the cables — but they also create linear cavities where water, cleaning chemicals, and organic matter can accumulate.
Flushing an enclosed cable channel is difficult. Verifying it's clean is impossible without disassembly. Over time, these channels become exactly the kind of hidden contamination point that food safety auditors look for.
JLS routes cables through open channels. The cables are accessible, visible, and cleanable along their entire run. No covers to remove. No enclosed spaces to flush. Sanitation crews can see the cable routing and clean it the same way they clean every other surface on the machine.
Any horizontal flat surface on a machine is a surface where water will pool. It doesn't matter if the surface is stainless steel — if water sits on it after washdown, it needs to be manually dried or it becomes a contamination risk.
JLS machines use sloped surfaces wherever a horizontal surface would otherwise exist. Panels, guards, mounting plates, and structural members are angled so water drains off under gravity. After washdown, the machine drains itself. Sanitation crews don't need to towel-dry the equipment.
This sounds like a small detail. Multiply it across every surface on a machine that's washed down every day, across every machine on a multi-line installation, and the time savings — and contamination risk reduction — are substantial.
IP69K is the highest ingress protection rating for water. It certifies that the equipment withstands high-pressure (1,450 psi), high-temperature (180 degrees F) water jets at close range. NEMA 4X certifies that electrical enclosures withstand washdown and corrosive environments.
On JLS machines, these aren't upgrade options. They're standard across the product families that operate in washdown environments. The Talon primary handling system, the Osprey case packing variants, the Harrier — all engineered for washdown, with IP69K-capable, NEMA 4X construction.
The rating applies to the machine as designed, not to a cover placed over the machine. This distinction matters. An IP69K cover over a non-washdown robot doesn't make the system IP69K — it makes the cover IP69K. If the cover fails, if a seal degrades, if maintenance removes a panel and doesn't reinstall it correctly, the underlying machine is exposed to an environment it wasn't built for.
Most robotic packaging competitors start with standard industrial robots — machines designed for automotive, electronics, or general manufacturing environments — and adapt them for food processing. The adaptation typically involves adding stainless steel covers, washdown-rated enclosures, and protective guards.
This approach can work. But it adds cost, adds maintenance complexity (every cover is a component that needs to be maintained, replaced, and verified), and creates the hidden cavity problem described above.
JLS doesn't adapt industrial robots for food. JLS designs and builds robots for food. The hygienic design principles — round tubes, bolted construction, open channels, sloped surfaces, IP69K ratings — are built into the machine from the first CAD sketch. Nothing is added after the fact to compensate for a design that wasn't right from the start.
This is what "Design for Agility" means at JLS. It's not a tagline. It's a design methodology that starts with the food processing environment and works backward to the machine — not the other way around.
[CTA: See JLS Hygienic Design Up Close]
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JLS Automation designs and builds hygienic robotic packaging systems at its facility in York, Pennsylvania. To learn more about our approach to sanitary machine design, visit [jlsautomation.com](https://www.jlsautomation.com) or call (717) 505-3800.