Automating Creativity: How Cobots and Innovation Are Transforming Food ProductionAutomating Creativity: How Cobots and Innovation Are Transforming Food Production

Automating Creativity: How Cobots and Innovation Are Transforming Food Production Transcript:

Announcer: You’re listening to The Kula Ring, a podcast made for manufacturing marketers. Here are Carman Pirie and Jeff White. 

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White. Joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: I’m well, happy to be here per normal. And I trust you’re doing well too. 

Jeff White: Yeah, I am. Listeners don’t necessarily know but we’re recording a number of episodes in the lead-up to the Christmas holidays for production in the new year. So it’s exciting to be doing a whole big batch of these 

Carman Pirie: indeed and it’s good to have a little bit of great white north content in today’s conversation We don’t always get to talk to folks from up here in Canada but while the folks joining us reside in Canada. They almost couldn’t be further away from us on the absolute complete opposite coast, but nevertheless. 

Jeff White: Yeah. Yeah. So joining us today are Jamie Bobyk, marketing manager and Doug Henderson, area sales manager for Canada International and the U S west with Apex Motion Control, welcome to The Kula Ring, gentlemen. 

Doug Henderson: Thank you. 

Jamie Bobyk: Welcome. Glad to be here. 

Carman Pirie: Guys. It’s great to have you on the show. Why don’t we just get started first with you, Jamie tell our listeners a little bit about you. Just give us the elevator speech of who is Jamie, if you would. 

Jamie Bobyk: Wow. Okay. It all started way back. No. I’ve always had a passion for the creative side. I’m a musician. For fun. I don’t make money at it and probably wouldn’t get paid anyway. But it’s always been there. So I started out my professional career as a red seal chef and worked at some higher-end restaurants and some private clubs and stuff like that, and I always had a passion for food and kind of got tired of that. It was a young person’s game. It was a lot of fun when you’re young, but you throw a few kids in there and things change. So decided to do a little change of career. At the age of 38 and I went back to school and a lot of people thought I was crazy. But anyways, I went through and from there, actually, I got a gig as a as a content writer, creative writer for a company called Unifilter Systems.

Been around a long time, big company and started there just. Trying to get their name out there. Brand recognition. They were having some issues with that and just helping them along with that. And then I quickly took over the marketing department and stayed with them for many years.

That’s where I actually met Doug and worked together with him there. And then from there, I just branched out into few other of their companies in the States. And then Middleby Corporation, and then came back to the Great White North and started working with Apex Motion Control through a mutual friend of ours, a professional guy in the industry by the name of Martin. And he brought me in, brought Doug in to Apex, and here we are now, and loving it. 

Carman Pirie: Very cool. From a red seal chef to a marketer of automation. I think it’s pretty, pretty interesting. Doug let’s get a snapshot as to who you are. Jamie kind of teed you up there a little bit. 

Doug Henderson: His background is a lot more interesting than mine. He’s teed himself up, I think is what he did.  Yeah, no, just I’ve been in sales for a long time, but in the baking business, as I’ve sold everything from Advertising to booze to, uh, you name it. It seems but I’ve been in the, in and out of baking business for the last 12 or 14 years. And as Jamie mentioned, we met at Unifiller, which is where I started in the baking business and a pretty great introduction to all of it. And as he also mentioned our mutual friend colleague, Martin Was kind of part of the vision along with our owner Rob, our owner of Apex Motion, who really took this company to the next level with the collaborative robot approach to applications in the baking business.

Became a perfect fit for for us, a, we wanted to, Jamie and I both liked working with Martin and Rob. We’ve done that before. So that was a perfect fit for us, and the timing couldn’t have been better as it started to take off right around Covid. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, gentlemen, it’s great to have you both on the show and perhaps just tell us a little bit too about Apex.

Jeff White:I know you just dropped some hints, but don’t know if we know exactly everything that you do there. 

Carman Pirie: Who wants to give us that speech? Is it the marketer or the sales guy? I wonder. I wonder. 

Doug Henderson: The marketer. 

Jamie Bobyk: You know what? I can start out and he can fill the holes that I leave. He’s pretty good at filling holes.

We’re Apex. Rob, is just this, he’s a very creative thinker. Really like just a brilliant man when it comes to figuring out automation. He’s worked in the packaging industry for a long time. He did his schooling in the US. And one of the first gigs I did with him outside of, because he was, he came into a Unifiller, that’s how we met Rob, was to Unifiller. He came in as a contractor there and he introduced a lot of next-level automation to Unifiller and that’s how they became such a player in their decorating avenue, I guess you could say.

But outside of that when he started Apex, I did some work with him and the first thing I did with him was a stem cell research lab in Vancouver. It was very interesting. I was covered in head to toe in white. All you could see was my eyes and I went in there and he had something called the lab capper, and it was basically putting caps on with a collaborative robot onto these tiny vials of really important stuff. And from there, he basically, I think he saw that his, his passion, his real interest was in bakery and food. He does stuff outside of that, but it’s a very interesting old industry but it’s a very interesting industry, always challenging. And I truly believe that this is where Rob belongs. And then like Doug said, it was chugging along but COVID really Opened up a lot of people’s eyes the fence-sitters, quickly got off the fence because they realized they had to do some adjustments to their production floor and people weren’t there to help them.

And we just grew from there and we just keep expanding and growing and experimenting. It’s a really open floor. The young guys, it’s have fun. You have a job to do. You have a project to complete, but let’s see what you guys can come up with. So it’s it allows everybody here to be creative thinkers. 

Carman Pirie: We’re basically talking about leveraging automation and leveraging cobots primarily in the food and like food and baking space. Yeah?

Doug Henderson: Yeah, I think a couple points part of where Rob started with the robotics was with the cake decorating and that was part of his relationship with Unifiller back in the day. And that was where he really, and we still to this day have a massive competitive edge. Nobody really does that or does it very well at all compared to what we do and have done. And some of the new things we’re doing are pretty exciting there too. And to Jamie’s point about baking, recession-proof industry food, We always say you can never underestimate people’s desire for sweets. Good times and bad. They want to have that. And so it’s a good place to be. And for whatever reason, a lot of robotics companies, there’s so many other opportunities for applications. They stay away from the food. And that’s just where we’re comfortable. And the one other thing I want to say about the company is, as I mentioned, I’ve got a varied background in sales and I work for many companies that call themselves sales organizations and that’s a whole other conversation, but we’re not that and I’m okay with that. Because what we do is provide solutions. And as long as we’re, we’re targeting the right thing. I don’t need to be in a sales organization. I just need to be with someone that solves problems and nothing that we do is as much as we know, the applications and bakery, nothing’s right out of the box. Some things are 90%, but that last 10% is what we do that nobody else does. Or that last 20%, or quite often the whole hundred percent.

But there are many applications that just need something, somebody that genius like Rob to figure out the final portion of it. And it just drives constant in innovation and continuous improvement. So that’s fun to be on the leading edge of. We’re pretty popular at trade shows. People love to come and see us right at trade shows. 

Jeff White: I bet. I’ve seen some of the videos you folks have online, so I can tell just how interesting and exciting it is to watch the robot work, but is this a space that is still relatively new to automation? Is this kind of thing still typically a fairly manual process, and how does that impact your go-to-market overall?

Doug Henderson: I’ll answer the 1st part. I’ll let Jamie maybe answer the 2nd part about the go-to-market. But yeah, it absolutely still is. I think one of our common themes as we talk about removing the dirty, dull and dangerous tasks those non-value-added tasks, a lot of people get romanticized about robots and want to romanticize about robots and say, oh, I want it to do. I always joke that they want to do 14 different things and the dishes at the end of the shift. And it’s, that’s not what they do. They create cost certainty for those tasks that, you have to do all of the time. If I know that I’m moving a rack from A to B, or sorry, a tray from A to B every day, all day, why am I watching somebody at 20 bucks an hour do that when I can have a robot do such a straightforward task?

And I think once people You know, these things aren’t free, but they’re not the ROI is usually pretty ridiculous. So once they get their head around that initial investment and they start to embrace it, and we talked earlier about personalizing and things like that, it’s the sky’s the limit. Most of the time when we get in somewhere, we get the first one and then we become part of their ecosystem going forward for a long time. 

Jamie Bobyk: Not sure if I have much to add to that. Doug’s pretty much said everything, but, talking on the automation piece, yeah, what we do I always refer to it as next-level automation, it’s still new to the market. Automation has been around forever. Henry Ford’s been, he was the innovator right way back when, but what we do is fairly new and quite new, especially in the decorating piece, like Doug had mentioned, nobody can touch us on that. It’s it’s a really steep learning curve for anyone to try to go after that business. And then, and bringing it to market, it’s just video is worth a million words, maybe even more because wouldn’t say that our videos are necessarily fancy, but they’re showing real-world examples and when a production manager gets on and looks at our videos, he goes, oh, man yeah, I actually need someone. I need something to do that. And that the trade shows people walk by and just this one of our cobots lifting a tray from a rack and putting it onto something. People are astounded. They’re just like, oh my God look at this, something as simple as that, they’re just blown away. 

Carman Pirie: There’s a bit of an intersection here, obviously, when you’re talking about the adoption of automation being relatively new in this category, still in its infancy. Which I’m assuming just leads to an awful lot more questions than there are answers when somebody’s first imagining what could be, which has to be part of the reason behind why video is so successful because just they need to see it in order to understand what’s even being talked about. So I’m backing into this question a little bit, Jamie, but or even Doug, either of you, I’m curious, if you’ve sold to people who are, really have been heavily into automation.

They maybe didn’t need to be educated on it. Is that video strategy still compelling? Do you still find that it brings those more experienced leads through the door as well? 

Doug Henderson: Absolutely. There are a couple of things to that end. And I know this isn’t all about Apex, but I have to, hats off to Jamie for generating the amount of activity that he does. I’ve been in environments where there’s a lot more heavy lifting on the sales end to bring stuff to the table. The videos are a huge part of that. And when we come, when you talk about somebody that’s experienced customer automation, those people tend to be a little bit more forward-thinking. And they’re also the ones always looking for the next idea. So they’re the ones out there scraping the Internet for those videos. I find, and they’re a little bit more open to they just see the next opportunity because baking’s baking. It’s the process and the recipes have been the same forever and ever.

There are all kinds of, dough laminators and sheeters and proofers and, you name it, all that stuff has been automated, but the actual movement of the product is where people are still paying people to do that. That comes back to the whole labour conversation, which is, I’m sure we’ll get into later, but, that’s kind of thing. So I hope that answers your question, but the people, some of the larger companies, they’ll spend millions and millions on some of the automation and they need to find. They can’t do that with everything because it means turning their plant upside down, but they can find corners of the plant where they can do some small things where there are mobile, flexible solutions. That allows them some versatility to do one-off products or support that one SKU that needs to have a few fewer people on the line or whatever it is. 

Carman Pirie: Oh, thank you for that, Doug. That’s really that’s an interesting answer and maybe you got me thinking now it’s interesting to think through the video content that appeals to those folks who have more of an in-depth knowledge of automation, the notion of them being more open to innovations and exploring what could be. That, that’s yeah, that’s really cool. 

Jamie Bobyk: Yeah, the video shows them what they can do. 

Doug Henderson: Yeah, I was talking too. There are two things I want to say. When there was a customer I met with a week or so ago, they just kept talking about the art of the possible. This was a mantra inside the company, not the art of the impossible.

They weren’t trying to do all the magic. They were trying to keep it simple and they had the right mindset to do that. The other reason that I mean, From an old sales guy’s point of view you can’t dial for dollars like you used to be able to, right? It’s not picking up the phone and doing this. You can’t get into places like you used to be able to get into places. So we have to get, penetrate other ways. And that’s what Jamie is so good at bringing that stuff to the table because I can call until I’m blue in the face, but, a people can screen, they can, they’ve got, You can’t walk up somewhere, knock on the door and expect to get in. Certainly since COVID, right? Because of all the restrictions and this, and people have taken full advantage to stop that from happening. I don’t blame them. So it’s a different landscape from a sales point of view as well, which is why again, the video becomes so important. 

Jeff White: I do love hearing about this too, however, because you don’t always hear the sales side of the business thinking or being appreciative or understanding the effort that goes into creating a solid lead volume with some of those, more content-led strategies, usually it’s. The leads are weak, we need more and better kinds of thing.

Doug Henderson: you attribute that comment to me, I will deny it.  

Jamie Bobyk: But you know what I gotta say, it’s probably one of the main reasons I brought Doug on because he really is, he does well at that. 

Jeff White: Is this just an informal kind of thing or do you guys have a any sort of actual metrics that you’re trying to hit with that, that you’re holding each other accountable to.

Jamie Bobyk: Kind of loosely there’s a, we have our yearly meetings. We talk about, Hey, what should we do? What can we do? Okay. Let’s make a list of what we can do. There’s no real. Hard numbers. My number one job is to give them give the sales team good leads. I don’t want them to do cold calling. I know they don’t want to do cold calling. So for me, the most important thing I can do is create leads, give them good quality leads and let them go from there because that’s what they do is take those leads. Meet with them, walk the plant and close it. And sometimes, the sales process is stuck and say it’s not like buying a stick of gum, right? This could be two years later where you’re closing something, but we can create a lifelong relationship with this customer where we can start stocking that plant with, different things that they need. So it’s all about creating that relationship with them, a lifetime, lifelong relationship with them.

Doug Henderson: As I mentioned earlier, we’re not necessarily a sales organization. The metrics aren’t terribly detailed when it comes to that. We do pay attention. And with that, we were on a call just before this talking about, how we’re projecting some of our confidence levels, in the pipeline and things like that.

And we do have some. We do have some measurements that we, you can’t, we always said you can’t manage what you can’t measure. So it is important, but it’s not a driving force in our business necessarily. And then our job, again, because we, we’re dealing with what’s, what I love about this business is it’s not transactional. So it’s not like Jamie said, not selling a piece of gum and down the road to the next place, everywhere we go, we typically are starting a relationship, not just the one and done. And that’s. That’s the type of selling I like and that’s why I like it here because it’s and then that’s where you know, From a lead point of view. That’s where I get referrals. That’s where I get That’s how I generate my share of the leads that I need to share or do myself 

Carman Pirie: this reference to relationship building Brings me to the relationships your clients find themselves building with the cobots that they buy. It’s one of the kind of, I always call them the dog watching TV moments, where your head tilts sideways and you’re like, huh, I’m trying to process that for a minute.

And I think that’s what happened the first time Jamie told me about how the personalization of the Cobot, what happens, what’s driven that. Talk to our listeners about that. What do you see there? And when did you first notice it? 

Jamie Bobyk: It’s just, from the beginning, it’s a human element and maybe it has to do with the size of the Cobot, right? It’s not one of those caged bots that are very impersonal, that’ll knock your head off. These, you can work alongside, you can actually, Put your arm around it if you want. It’s I think for them dealing with that type of technology putting a human element to it, and I don’t know if that starts from the top and maybe making the production workers feel more at home with this technology going okay, we’re not going to boot you out for this cobot. This guy, this girl, this guy, whatever is part of the team. And it’s not per se the owners that are naming them. It’s a lot of times it’s people on the floor that are naming these cobots that work along with them.

And Doug, he’s walked these plants, he’s seen it. 

Doug Henderson: Yeah, I think you were, you touched around the edges of it there. I think it really is a leadership question, because if I’m going to introduce that into my plant, I have to have buy-in, because people are always afraid of their jobs, right? This is going to take my job.

We always talk about repurposing people to more value-added tasks, not about replacing people because we’re not, I need a job. I don’t, I’m not trying to get in, or put anybody out of work. That’s not our goal. But if you can give people a little more meat on the bone in their day, then that’s better. I think that’s a leadership question. And there’s the 1 thing we can say without fear of contradiction is if you don’t have that binder, you don’t have a champion for this equipment to work in the facility. You are doomed. You have to have the people who want it to work in the facility. And yeah, and so I think, again, from a leadership point of view, if they want to personalize it, then people treat it a little bit differently.

I think that’s a pretty good idea. 

Carman Pirie: And what percentage of your clients do you find do that? When you’re walking through the factory, how many of them name the robots? 

Doug Henderson: That wouldn’t be that high actually naming them, but there are, there’s more than a few the percentage wouldn’t be that high.

Jeff White: Interesting. Maybe a Google Google AI strategy sent out to to the factory floors to personalize their robots creates a bit more 

Doug Henderson: A lot of them have hairnets. Yeah. Yeah, they put the over here and it’s over the screen or sometimes over part of the arm. 

Jamie Bobyk: Don’t we have a customer that actually took our decal off and put their own decal on?

Doug Henderson: He’s so funny. He’s  loves us and he wants to keep doing more and more with us, but he doesn’t want to tell anybody that he’s working with us. So he covered up our decals with his own. Like it was his idea and he’s very open. He showed me the picture. He said, look what I did. You’re not helping, but these are, one of the, one of the funny challenges I get all the time is people say can you take me to a place that has this so I can see how it’s working?

And of course, those are the people that if I asked them to let somebody in their plant, they would say not in a million years when I let anybody walk into my place, people don’t like to share too much and they think they have a leg up when they’re doing it, which is, and that’s fine. As I said, baking is baking and recipes can be tweaked and this, that, and the other, but quite frankly, a lot of them are doing, and I don’t want to upset any of my customers, but a lot of them are doing the same thing.

They’re just all trying to find a more efficient way to do it. And again, back to the whole COVID thing, it was that its cost certainty is what they get. They know what that job is going to cost them going forward. Not whether or not somebody is going to show up on Monday or take Fridays off, or they know what it’s going to cost them to do that task. And that’s what gives them a leg up. 

Jeff White: Let’s talk about that a little bit certainly a huge consideration in the manufacturing space and all levels of the operation, HR is a significant concern. So how do you leverage that? Are you talking primarily about the ROI of the machines and the consistency, or are you providing tips and tricks for how to re-utilize some of the displaced resources within the factory, like, how are you going about that?

Doug Henderson: The ROI Question. I often have a conversation with customers about what I call the linear ROI Which is simply the hours that they’re saving, if an employee costs 50 grand and the robot costs X, it’s a year and a half. It’s 2 years. It’s 2 shifts. It’s 3 shifts. That’s just a straight-across number where you can do the math, but we always have to add in the soft costs, which is the HR portion, how much time is spent hiring, training and recruiting, firing, hiring, training, recruiting, and when people don’t show up and you have to. Move somebody from here to there. What does that cost you? So we’re always, it’s very difficult to put a number on that, but we’re always making sure that’s part of the conversation. And I did have somebody say to me not that long ago we were just chatting about all of it and he looked at me and he said, HR is now the biggest department in my company and I can’t have that.

It’s just that they just have to get people in and out all the time, using temp agencies, doing whatever they can. So much energy and money was spent on that. These are the things we’re trying to help with. 

Jamie Bobyk: And those conversations that Doug has, personally, are a lot easier than, from my point, because I can’t go out there and start blowing my horn about, replacing people with co-bots.

It just, doesn’t work. It’s not good. So when you’re, you’re in front of a, You’re at company in front of somebody you can actually talk about the things and not say replacing, but it’s just an easier canvas to work on. So we’ve got to be careful when we’re marketing how we market our products. Repurposing is always a big thing I’ve talked to. I’ve been in doing some video interviews and they that’s what they say. We’re not trying to get rid of people We just want to repurpose them and get them off this stuff that’s causing, repetitive injuries And that’s a huge thing and I don’t know if California is still a big one But California used to be a really big one for that their benefits their health benefits that companies have to pay are huge you know It’s all part of the conversation 

Doug Henderson: California and Washington State are the two most expensive that I’ve come across lately. For that, because of the insurance and the minimum wage. 

Carman Pirie: So then there’s a real built-in incentive to look at how to take some of these positions that have the most exposure to repetitive stress injuries, things of that nature and automating. That makes total sense to me. I’ve got to think too, gentlemen. that the door is opening even further to having this conversation. And I appreciate, Jamie, what you’re saying that maybe doesn’t feel overly politically correct sometimes to say it, but, or you’re cautious about suggesting that you’re going to replace labor.

But I think most manufacturing organizations, be they People in food and baking enterprises or in more industrial settings. They’re seeing it from a point of view of what the political environment now talking about more restrictions on immigration flow. Maybe things aren’t going to be as loose in that way in North America in the coming years as they have been in previous years and I think every one of those organizations will be very much open to the reality of what that means from their ability to recruit people at those more challenging manual tasks, right? 

Jamie Bobyk: I agree, 100%. 

Carman Pirie: You guys are the right place at the right time. 

Doug Henderson: But it, so just another example, like people will, it’s so hard to get people in a lot of these places just to hire them and they’ll hire them and they’ll get them in and they’ll give them one of these jobs on day one palletizing or moving heavy boxes, which is boring, repetitive. They don’t come back on day two and you start all over again. So again, eliminate all of that and try to find, things that will add value to the business. 

Carman Pirie: It’s been a fascinating discussion and exploration of this. I think we could probably continue on for another hour and find all kinds of nooks and crannies to explore.

I guess I may want to turn our attention to 2025 as we conclude the show, what are you seeing around the corner for this content program, Jamie? You’ve been getting all kinds of backslaps here from Doug throughout this show about the quality and volume of leads that you’re driving. Any new tools in the bag for 2025 or, anything that you see that maybe needs to be adjusted or challenges on the horizon for that strategy that you’ve been deploying? 

Jamie Bobyk: For me, and I keep pushing for this content is king, but part of that content is video. And so I’m always, I’m bugging everybody. I bug everybody all the time because I want to get into some of these facilities and do stories. It works. It gives us long legs when we get in and do a story on someone and we put it out there. We sell equipment. We have people that say, hey, I saw your video on the X and X company. I want that piece of equipment. So it really does work. It’s just, I don’t have to prove anything else. So I wouldn’t mind doing some international stuff to show some of that presence. Doug actually just got back from Scotland. For a really good visit of a bunch of plants in Scotland. It’d be fantastic if I could get over there and do once we, and who knows when that will be, but getting and showing people these stories, I think anyone that’s running or owning these companies can see and listen to those stories and make it real. It works. It really does. That’s about it. There’s nothing magical that I have planned. But repetition and pushing for more video content in the facilities. 

Carman Pirie: Jamie, I appreciate that answer a lot because there’s a level of stick-to-itiveness that’s required in marketing and sometimes it’s really easy to chase the bright, shiny object and head down the new strategy, throw out what you’ve been doing, try something new. I have a lot of appetite for what you just said and there’s, I think there’s a lot of wisdom in, in that. I wish you all the best with that. I think you guys are my money is on you folks in 2025. I think things are looking up. Thanks so much, gentlemen. 

Doug Henderson: Our pleasure. Thanks for the time.

Jamie Bobyk: Hey, thanks a lot for the call. 

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