Canned Food Production: Appert to ABB Palletizers

Canned food production is a long chain of filling, sealing, cooking under pressure, labelling, packing and stacking. This post follows that chain from the Napoleonic prize that started it to the steam retorts of early twentieth century canneries, where most of the handling was still done by hand, sometimes by children. It then looks at where robots work in canneries today, including a real ABB palletizing line at an Australian cannery, and at the problems the industry still has with cost, hygiene and skills. Making the empty cans is a separate job, covered in our post on beverage can making.

Shelves of canned fish, meat and vegetables in a supermarket. Photo: ProjectManhattan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

How Appert, Durand and hand soldering started canning

Canning began as a military problem. Shortly before the Napoleonic Wars the French government offered 12,000 francs for a cheap way to preserve large amounts of food for the army. Nicolas Appert, a confectioner and brewer, noticed that food cooked inside a sealed jar did not spoil unless the seal leaked, and he won the prize in 1810. Nobody yet knew why it worked. Louis Pasteur showed the role of microbes about 50 years later. Earlier still, the Dutch navy is reported to have carried brine cooked salmon in tin plated iron boxes as early as 1772.

Soldering tins and conveying them to the retort in a British Columbia salmon cannery, 1909. Photo: British Columbia Bureau of Provincial Information via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The metal can came from London. In 1810 Peter Durand patented the tin can, an idea that may have come from the Frenchman Philippe de Girard, and in 1811 he sold the patent to Bryan Donkin and John Hall of Bermondsey. Every can was made by hand from tinned wrought iron and sealed with solder, and a large can could take up to six hours to cook. That made canned food expensive, so its first buyers were the British Army and Royal Navy. Robert Ayars opened the first American canning factory in New York in 1812.

Workers at noon outside an Indianapolis cannery, August 1908. Photo: Lewis Hine / US National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Machines arrived through the nineteenth century. By the 1860s smaller machine made steel cans were possible and cooking time had fallen from about six hours to thirty minutes. The key piece was the retort, a steam pressure vessel. Workers stacked sealed cans into iron baskets or crates and rolled them inside, and a 1914 photo caption from a salmon cannery describes cans cooked for an hour and fifteen minutes at 242 degrees Fahrenheit. The rest of the handling stayed manual for decades, and Lewis Hine photographed children working in American canneries around 1908 to 1911.

A crate of canned salmon rolled out of a steam retort in a Washington cannery, around 1913. Photo: Unknown photographer via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Where robots and ABB palletizers work in canneries today

A modern cannery runs filling, seaming and labelling at high speed on dedicated machines, and these are rarely robots. Robots show up at the awkward points between machines. One is the retort: cans have to be loaded into baskets in layers, often with separator sheets between them, then unloaded after cooking while they are still hot. Another is the end of the line, where cans go into trays, cartons or shrink wrapped packs and then onto pallets. Both jobs are heavy, repetitive and run around the clock in the harvest season.

Pallets of filled jars with layer sheets at a canned food factory in Armenia, 2006. Photo: Narek75 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB has a documented example. At the Australian cannery SPC Ardmona, a line installed in early 2007 uses an ABB IRB 260 robot to form layers of product, and two IRB 660 robots palletize them because one alone could not keep up. The system handles wraparound cartons, open top and shrink wrapped trays of canned food and loose cans, and it uses conveyor tracking so the robots pick from moving belts. Our module on conveyor tracking shows how that is set up. The reported benefit was that constant manual intervention was no longer needed.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizing robot stacking boxed products, the model SPC Ardmona uses in pairs. Photo: ABB

Canneries are also under pressure. On 16 September 2026 Fresh Plaza reported that a Western Cape fruit cannery would not reopen for the coming harvest, and on 23 September GroundUp reported that peach farmers were being offered cash to end their Tulbagh cannery contracts. Earlier reports said the owner, Premier, processes apricots, peaches and pears there. Closures like this show how thin the margins are in seasonal canning. For packing, ABB's IRB 360 FlexPicker can place cans or small packs into cartons at high speed, the job described in our post on case packing.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items at high speed. Photo: ABB

What comes next for canning lines and robots

In factories, the next step is likely more automation around the retort. Loading and unloading baskets layer by layer is a natural job for a palletizing robot such as an IRB 460 or IRB 660 with a layer gripper, since it is the same motion as building a pallet. ABB does not list a retort loading product, so treat this as a possibility; we found no ABB installation doing it. Hot, wet cans and steam call for robots with suitable protection, and the cell has to be planned around food safety rules. Engineers usually check reach and cycle times first in RobotStudio before building anything.

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

Shoppers will not see a robot in the can, but they may notice whether the shelf is full. Fruit and vegetable canneries work in short harvest seasons and struggle to find workers for a few weeks a year. A palletizer that can switch between can sizes and pallet patterns with software helps a plant run several products on one line. Home canning with jars and a pressure canner will stay a manual hobby, still based on Appert's idea of heating food in a sealed container.

Canned tuna on the shelf of a grocery store, 2018. Photo: Wilfredor / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Cost is the first hurdle, because a cannery that runs only part of the year has fewer hours to pay back a robot cell. Equipment near open food must be easy to wash, and heavy robots near people need guarding or monitored zones such as SafeMove. And many canneries are in rural towns where few people program robots, so simple tools like Wizard easy programming and PickMaster for vision guided picking matter as much as the hardware.

Horizontal steam retorts in the Kake Salmon Cannery in Alaska, recorded in 2000. Photo: Jet Lowe / HAER, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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