Detergent Packing: From Persil Boxes to ABB Robots

How detergent packing moved from hand-wrapped soap and Persil boxes to pods, bottles and unattended shifts, and where ABB FlexPicker and palletizing robots fit.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/14/20265 min read

A tub of laundry pods, a jug of liquid and a box of powder all leave the factory the same way: filled, capped, packed into cases and stacked on pallets, often at hundreds of units a minute. This post is about detergent packing, from soap bars wrapped by hand and the first Persil boxes of 1907, through powder towers and the arrival of pods, to P&G's October 2026 update on unattended shifts and vision checks. We also look at where ABB robots such as the IRB 360 FlexPicker and the IRB 660 palletizer fit on a detergent line, and what is still hard.

Clear plastic tub of Tide Pods capsules beside orange Tide boxes on a store shelf

Tubs and boxes of Tide Pods laundry capsules on a store shelf, 2012. Photo: Austin Kirk / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How soap and washing powder were packed by hand

Before washing powder, people washed clothes with soap, and soap factories boiled fats and alkali in big kettles, poured the result into frames and cut it into bars. Packing was women's work at long tables. A 1919 photo from Colgate-Palmolive's plant in Toronto shows rows of women wrapping bars of soap and filling cartons by hand. Our post on soap bar manufacturing follows that side of the story, from Aleppo vats to modern plodders and wrapping machines.

Black and white photo of rows of women at long tables wrapping soap and filling cartons

Women wrap and pack bars of soap by hand at the Colgate-Palmolive plant in Toronto, 1919. Photo: Pringle and Booth via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Washing powder changed the product. Fritz Henkel and two partners founded Henkel & Cie in Aachen on 26 September 1876, moved to Düsseldorf and sold Henkel's Bleich-Soda from 1878. Since 1900 its headquarters have been in Düsseldorf-Holthausen. In 1907 the company launched Persil, named after its perborate and silicate ingredients and sold as a powder in a box. Henkel made 4,700 tonnes of it in 1908 and about seven times as much by 1915. In September 2026 Henkel marked its 150th anniversary; it now runs about 165 production sites.

Green four-sided street clock column with Persil signs and painted women in white dresses

An old Persil advertising clock with the brand's White Lady figure in Wismar, Germany. Photo: Rolf Kranz / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Synthetic detergents came next. Procter & Gamble launched Tide in the United States in 1946, and powders like it were made by spraying a hot slurry into tall drying towers, where it fell as a light powder. From there machines weighed the powder into cartons, closed and glued them, and people packed the cartons into cases and stacked them on pallets by hand, case after case. Smaller makers did the same; the Dutch soap maker De Klok in Heerde sold its Klik washing powder in a tall printed pack.

Old red and cream cardboard pack of Klik washing powder with Dutch text

A pack of Klik washing powder from the De Klok soap factory in Heerde, the Netherlands. Photo: Alf van Beem / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Detergent lines in 2026: pods, bottles and unattended shifts

Pods brought a new kind of package to the line. P&G's Salvo tablets of the 1960s disappeared within about a decade, but Tide Pods, launched in February 2012, stuck. The liquid inside contains about 10% water, against about 50% in a normal liquid detergent, and the pouch is a water-soluble film of polyvinyl alcohol. After children swallowed pods, P&G moved to opaque tubs with double latches, and ASTM wrote a voluntary safety standard in late 2015. Those latched tubs are now one more thing the packing line has to fill, close and check.

Pile of green liquid laundry capsules in clear soft film on a white background

Green liquid detergent capsules wrapped in water-soluble film. Photo: ajcespedes / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

On 5 October 2026 P&G described how its Product Supply organization, which makes Tide among other brands, is changing its plants. It aims for 98% on-shelf and online availability. P&G says Product Supply saved $1.5 billion through cost cuts last fiscal year. It is adding vision systems for quality checks to cut scrap, and its Grooming plant in Berlin has run a four-hour night shift with nobody operating the line, a pilot P&G is now spreading to other sites. It also trains plant technicians in digital skills through a program called SPARK. The post does not say which robots P&G uses.

Large old brick factory buildings with a clock tower behind a wide lawn

Procter and Gamble's Ivorydale plant in Cincinnati, Ohio, photographed in 1978. Photo: Bmzuckerman / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

ABB robots would sit at this end of the line. The IRB 360 FlexPicker picks light items from a moving belt at high speed and places them into trays or cases, guided by cameras and the PickMaster software, and some versions are built for washdown. A FlexPicker could load pouches, refill packs or small tubs into shipping cases. At the end of the line, palletizers such as the IRB 460 and IRB 660 stack heavy cases of bottles and powder boxes. We have found no published ABB project at a detergent plant, so this is a possible fit, as on the lines in our case packing post.

Row of ABB delta robots above a conveyor placing red items into cardboard boxes

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

Where detergent packing goes next

Formats keep multiplying. Detergent now comes as powder, liquid, pods and even thin sheets of pressed powder, and retailers want mixed pallets, display trays and e-commerce packs that survive a parcel trip. Every new format means a changeover on the packing line. Robots help here because a new pick pattern or pallet layout is a software change, and cells can be planned and tested in RobotStudio before the line stops for a format change.

Engineer at a desk with a laptop next to a glass enclosed ABB delta robot cell

An ABB FlexPicker cell set up with PickMaster Lite. Photo: ABB

Liquid detergent jugs are heavy, have handles and caps that must face the right way, and sometimes leak. Picking them from a conveyor and placing them into cases needs grippers that can cope with slippery plastic, and larger arms like the IRB 1300 or IRB 4600 would suit the heavier jugs. Refill pouches and concentrated formulas are lighter and could suit faster delta robots, whose small payload rules out a full jug. Vision checks for leaks and missing caps are the kind of job P&G says it is automating.

Orange Tide liquid detergent bottle with Chinese text standing next to a blue plastic box

A bottle of Tide liquid detergent made for the Chinese market. Photo: Dinkun Chen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Detergent dust and spilled liquid are hard on equipment, so robots need sealed joints and easy cleaning. Fast, cheap packing machines already do much of the filling, so a robot usually pays off where a line changes format often. Child-resistant tubs have latches that must close properly every time, which adds sensors and reject stations. P&G's answer to the skills problem is SPARK, its digital training program for plant technicians. Plants running unattended night shifts, like P&G's Berlin pilot, also need technicians who can fix a stopped cell quickly the next morning.

White ABB palletizing robot stacking brown and red cases onto pallets in a factory cell

An ABB IRB 660 palletizer stacking cases at the end of a packing line. Photo: ABB

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