Aagard Engineered a Frozen Meal System for Fragile Aluminum Trays

Some of the best automation stories don’t start with a blank slate—they start with a challenge that keeps coming back until someone finally cracks it. That was the case with this project: a high-end frozen entrée, a delicate aluminum tray, and a customer who had worked with us before and knew exactly who to call when it was time to do something hard.

Combination machine made to handle delicate aluminum trays, ensuring product made it through shipping process without damage.

A Fragile Product Meets a Demanding Process

The product? A premium, oven-ready frozen meal packed in a thin aluminum tray. Unlike typical plastic trays that can take a bit rougher handling, these required a new level of handling. Traditional conveying and collating methods were not going to work.

The customer’s goal was clear: automate the process without damaging the product. But the path to getting there? That took engineering.

Rethinking the Process, One Touchpoint at a Time

We started where we always do—by studying the challenge from every angle. The trays couldn’t be forced into lanes or bumped along conveyors. Instead, we let them arrive gently on a wide belt, keeping their orientation and minimizing contact. From there, robotic pick-and-place systems took over, carefully lifting and orienting each tray with precision. No compression, no collisions—just clean, controlled handling.

We also helped refine the sleeve design itself. The customer needed the sleeve to lock securely around the tray, including a footed base that would let the packaged product stand vertically at retail. To support this, we implemented an indexing system that gently guided the trays into position and allowed for accurate folding, crimping, and sealing without stressing the package.

Combination machine with inline indexing to gently guide trays into position.

That might sound simple, but it took several rounds of revisions—especially when it came to machine layout. Originally, the indexing was set up perpendicular to product flow, but that limited access to key stations. So, we re-engineered it to an inline index, dramatically improving visibility, accessibility, and maintainability across the entire sleever.

Integrated Challenges, One Unified System

The sleeving system didn’t stand alone. It had to flow directly into a case packing system that used a previously developed, retail-ready case. The twist? Everything—from robotic infeed to sleeve handling to case packing—had to happen in a tight footprint on a mezzanine. And, like many frozen food lines, product came straight from the freezer, requiring us to manage the feed rate based on real-time line conditions.

We packed all of this into a single frame, engineered with multiple access points and built-in walkways to keep the system serviceable. Even with a heavy sealed tray in motion, the system used precision Connix positioning to track each unit, rotate, and maintain perfect control from start to finish.

Why They Chose Aagard—Again

This wasn’t our first project with this customer. We’d earned their trust by solving big problems before—and when it came time to take on this fragile new format, they didn’t go out for bids. They came straight to us.

That’s the real story here. Yes, we built a combination sleever and case packer capable of handling fragile aluminum trays at high speeds. Yes, we did it in a tight footprint on a mezzanine with high accessibility and smart line integration. But what really matters is the trust we’d built before, and the engineering it took to make this system work.

And that’s what we mean when we say we build machines that are purpose-built.