Beverage Can Making: From Soldered Tins to ABB Robots

The world makes about 370 billion drink cans a year, and the presses and bodymakers that form them already run on their own at very high speed. That leaves a smaller, odder job for a can manufacturing robot in beverage can making. This post looks at how cans were made before machines, how the two-piece aluminium can changed the factory, what new plants announced in September 2026 tell us, and where ABB robots could take on the heavy, awkward work around the line: coils, tooling and pallets.

The ring-pull tab on the lid of an aluminium drink can. Photo: Marcos André / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How tinsmiths soldered cans by hand

The tin can started as a hand-made object. Peter Durand took out an English patent on canning in 1810 and sold it to Bryan Donkin and John Hall, who set up the first commercial canning factory in Southwark, London, and were supplying the Royal Navy by 1813. Each can was cut from tinplate, rolled around a form and closed with a soldered seam by a tinsmith, then capped with a soldered lid. The solder was a tin and lead alloy, and early cans sealed with high lead solder could and did cause lead poisoning.

A tinsmith cuts sheet metal in his workshop in Japan, around 1910, on a hand-tinted glass slide. Photo: University of Victoria Libraries via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

Machines took over step by step. Automatic soldering machines started to appear in the 1870s, and steel began to replace iron at the very end of the nineteenth century. In 1888 Max Ams invented the locking side seam, which led to the "sanitary can", with solder only on the outside where it never touched the food. By the early twentieth century, can makers such as the Southern Can Company in Baltimore ran automatic body makers that fed flat sheet, formed the body and soldered the seam in one machine. Canneries used double seamers to crimp lids on without solder or acid.

A Bliss No. 22-N automatic can body maker with soldering attachment at the Southern Can Company, Baltimore, 1921. Photo: unknown author, Freshwater and Marine Image Bank via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Beer and soft drinks came later. The first commercial canned beer went on sale in 1935 in Richmond, Virginia, in a heavy steel can made from three pieces. In 1959 the Adolph Coors Company brought out a 7 oz aluminium can, and the same year Ermal Fraze invented a pull tab. The bigger change was the two-piece can: a flat blank is punched from stiff cold-rolled aluminium sheet, drawn into a cup and then ironed into a tall thin wall, with no side seam at all. Daniel Cudzik's stay-on tab followed in 1975. US makers dropped lead seams from food cans in 1991.

A Neuweiler's Cream Ale can from Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1935, the year beer cans first went on sale. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

New can plants and where robots work today

Demand is still growing, and new plants are going up. In September 2026 Crown Holdings broke ground on its first beverage can plant in India, at Unnao in Uttar Pradesh, and Ball Corporation picked a site in the same state for a two-line plant. The two projects add up to about INR 50 billion (around USD 523 million). In Russia, Alba Voronezh opened a plant rated at 4,000 cans per minute. Tariffs are moving supply too: the Globe and Mail reported that US tariffs are pushing Canadian brewers toward aluminium cans from China.

The entrance of Can-Pack's beverage can factory in Bydgoszcz, Poland, 2015. Photo: Pit1233 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Inside a modern plant the main line is hard automation. A cupper blanks and draws cups from the coil, bodymakers iron them into cans, and trimmers, washers, printers, neckers and testers follow, each machine built for one job at very high speed, with no place for a robot arm. Robots fit at the edges, where the work is heavy, varied and done less often. Aluminium arrives as coils weighing several tonnes, bodymaker tooling has to be swapped and checked, and finished cans leave in tall layered pallets with tier sheets between the layers.

Pallets of printed cans stacked beside the canning machine at NOLA Brewing in New Orleans, 2012. Photo: Infrogmation of New Orleans / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Pallets are where ABB robots already do this kind of work in drinks plants. The IRB 660 and IRB 460 are four-axis palletizers built for end-of-line stacking; ABB rates the IRB 460 at a 110 kg payload and fast cycles for high-throughput lines. Fitted with a layer gripper, a robot like this can lift a whole layer of cans or set tier sheets and top frames. ABB palletizing robots run on UHT milk lines at Piracanjuba in Brazil, for example. We found no source naming an ABB robot inside a specific can maker, so for can plants this is a possible fit with no reference customer yet. Similar cells are covered in our brewery automation post.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizing robot stacking boxed products at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

What comes next for can plants

The next robot jobs are likely to come in material handling and changeovers. Coils could move from storage to the uncoiler on autonomous vehicles instead of forklifts, and tooling carts could travel to the bodymakers on a schedule. A larger arm such as an IRB 6700 could, in principle, hold and present heavy die packs while a technician fixes them, cutting the time a line sits idle. Cells like this are normally planned in RobotStudio first, so a team can check reach, payload and guarding before anything is bolted down near a machine running thousands of cans a minute.

Coils of steel sheet in a factory store. Can plants receive their aluminium and tinplate in coils like these. Photo: Shandong Mingtong Metal Manufacturing / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Quality checks are another area. Cans already pass light testers and camera inspection, but sample cans are still pulled by hand for checks of wall thickness, dome strength and print. A small robot such as a GoFa or an IRB 1300 could take samples on a timer and load them into gauges, with the results logged. For homes, the link is less direct. Beer, soda and canned water all depend on cheap cans, and more plants close to buyers, like the new ones in India, mean fewer cans trucked across borders.

An ABB four-axis palletizing robot with a layer gripper in a packaging line cell. Photo: ABB

The open problems are cost, safety and skills. Can lines are tuned for speed, and every robot that slows a changeover or blocks an aisle costs money. Robots near heavy coils and moving forklifts need careful safety zones, which software such as SafeMove can help define. Plants also need technicians who can program and repair robots as well as presses, and new plants in places like Uttar Pradesh will have to train them. ABB's Flexley Mover AMRs show how coils and tool carts could move without a driver, but in can making that is still a possibility.

An ABB Flexley Mover P604 among wooden pallets; it finds its way with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

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