After more than 300 palletizing deployments in 2025—and over 900 Lean Palletizing units now running in production—we saw a clear pattern emerge.
The manufacturers who succeeded didn’t have perfect data, unlimited budgets, or robotics teams on standby. What they had was clarity: on their pain, their priorities, and their willingness to start.
Here’s what 2025 taught us about palletizing automation and what it means if you’re considering your first move.
And if you prefer watching over reading, you can get these insights along with video case studies from SC Johnson, Coca-Cola, and Korea Filter Engineering in our webinar replay.
By 2025, labor shortages stopped being a risk and became an operating condition.
Across food, beverage, and consumer goods, manufacturers told us the same story:
The lesson was blunt: cobot palletizing protects production continuity. It doesn’t solve hiring—but it removes your most fragile dependency from the equation.
Many manufacturers assume automation decisions are driven by throughput. In reality, safety unlocked approvals faster than productivity gains.
Projects moved quickest when:
Ergonomic risks were clearly documented
HSE and HR were involved early
Palletizing was framed as a long-term safety investment
In 2025, the fastest projects didn’t start with cycle times. They started with people.
Winning projects didn’t “prove ROI later.” They quantified it upfront.
Successful teams came prepared with:
Projects that stalled often lacked a financial baseline or a clear owner. The takeaway: ROI framed as cost avoidance succeeds, especially with operations and finance stakeholders.
Ambition killed more projects than budget.
Manufacturers who succeeded started with:
They deployed, learned, stabilized—and only then scaled. Waiting for the “perfect” factory-wide solution consistently delayed progress. In 2025, momentum beat perfection every time.
Some stalled projects had the right robot, the right application, and the right partner. What they didn’t have was ownership.
Successful palletizing projects had:
Automation treated as a “nice-to-have” rarely moved forward. Decisions must be owned to move.
One of the biggest surprises from 2025: how many manufacturers already qualified for cobot palletizing.
If your application looks like this:
You’re likely lower risk than you think. For many plants, the barrier wasn’t feasibility—it was perception.
Palletizing consistently delivered the fastest relief because:
Compared to automating earlier production steps, end-of-line palletizing minimized disruption while delivering immediate operational impact.
A common hesitation we heard: “We’ll automate when volumes increase.”
In reality, labor constraints hit before growth does. Manufacturers who automated early used palletizing to:
Those who waited often found themselves reacting under pressure. In 2025, automation worked best as a growth enabler, not a last resort.
Manufacturers routinely overestimated how fast they needed to palletize.
What actually mattered:
Peak speed looked good on paper. Reliable flexibility won on the floor.
The most successful manufacturers stopped treating palletizing as a one-off automation project.
Instead, they treated cobots like:
When palletizing felt complex and risky, adoption suffered. When it felt familiar and usable, it stuck.
Integration fear is bigger than the real integration effort.
Most deployments happened in 1–3 days, not weeks, with minimal upstream changes and lighter IT involvement than expected.
Downtime risk matters more than capital cost.
Executives focused less on CapEx and more on missed shipments, overtime, and exposure when labor didn’t show up.
Ease of use determines long-term success.
Operators—not engineers—run palletizers every day. Simple interfaces and fast training consistently outperformed advanced features.
Manufacturers who moved forward typically began with:
The lesson from 2025 is clear: palletizing automation doesn’t need to be complex to be effective. It needs to be grounded in real operational pain—and designed for the people who run it every day.
Not every line has the same requirements. Payload, cycle time, SKU mix, and available space all matter.
Use Robotiq's Palletizing Fit Tool to quickly assess whether cobot palletizing makes sense for your operation and what a realistic deployment could look like for your facility.