Why Chub Case Packing Is Still Done by Hand — and What It Takes to Change That

Ground meat. Sausage logs. Pet food rolls. Cookie dough. These products all share a common shape — the chub — and a common problem at the end of the line: they're still being packed into cases by hand.

Walk through most meat and poultry plants today and you'll find the grinding, stuffing, and clipping operations running at full speed. Then you'll reach the case packing station — and there's a crew of workers manually placing chubs into corrugated cases, one at a time. It's slow, physically demanding, and hard to staff.

So why hasn't automation solved this?

The Rolling Problem

Chubs are cylinders. Put a cylinder on a flat conveyor belt and it does what cylinders do — it rolls. That movement makes it nearly impossible for a conventional pick-and-place system to acquire the product reliably. The robot reaches for a chub and it's already shifted position. Throughput drops. Misfeeds climb. Operators end up babysitting the machine instead of doing higher-value work.

This is why most food packaging automation has focused on flat or rigid products first — trays, pouches, cartons, clamshells. Those shapes sit still on a conveyor. Chubs don't.

Beyond Rolling: The Hygiene Challenge

Even if you solve the rolling problem, chub packing environments present a second challenge. Ground meat and sausage processing areas are wet, cold, and subject to aggressive washdown protocols. Equipment in these zones needs to withstand high-pressure, high-temperature cleaning — every shift, every day.

Standard secondary packaging equipment isn't designed for this. Most case packers on the market are built for dry environments and retrofitted with covers or guards for use in food plants. That approach creates water traps, hard-to-clean cavities, and sanitation headaches that defeat the purpose of automation.

What It Actually Takes

Automating chub case packing requires solving both problems at once: product stability and hygienic design. The equipment needs to control the chub so it can't roll during picking, and it needs to survive the washdown environment without harboring bacteria or corroding.

At JLS, we addressed the stability challenge with the [V-TRACK™ pick conveyor](https://www.jlsautomation.com/automatic-chub-loading-system) — a proprietary V-shaped track that cradles each chub and eliminates rolling entirely. The vision system sees exactly where each chub sits, and [vision-guided delta robots](https://www.jlsautomation.com/automatic-chub-loading-system) robots with VOB® vacuum tooling acquire chubs regardless of diameter or weight.

For hygiene, we didn't retrofit an existing machine. The [Osprey CL](https://www.jlsautomation.com/automatic-chub-loading-system) was designed from the ground up with NEMA 4X sanitary stainless steel construction, continuous welds, and an open-frame architecture that's built to get wet.

The Bottom Line

Chub packing has stayed manual not because automation doesn't make sense — the labor costs, the repetitive strain injuries, the throughput limitations all point clearly toward automation. It stayed manual because the equipment didn't exist to handle a rolling product in a washdown environment.

That's changed. The Osprey CL loads chubs from 8 oz to 10 lbs into cases at up to 200 chubs per minute in a dual-head configuration — in the same wet, cold environment where your grinder and stuffer already operate.

If your packers are still keeping up with your stuffer by hand, it's worth a conversation about what's possible now.

[CTA: See the Osprey CL in Action]

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JLS Automation designs and builds hygienic robotic packaging systems at its facility in York, Pennsylvania. To learn more about automating chub case packing, visit [jlsautomation.com/automatic-chub-loading-system](https://www.jlsautomation.com/automatic-chub-loading-system) or call (717) 505-3800.