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From 18 to 21 October, McCormick Place in Chicago hosts PACK EXPO International 2026, North America's major packaging and processing show. According to PMMI, the association that organises it, it will bring together more than 2,700 exhibitors across 1.3 million net square feet (around 120,000 m²) and expects some 48,000 professionals from over 40 markets. There will be more than 150 free sessions across five areas on the show floor, and the announced topics include end-of-line automation as an answer to labour shortages, trends in robotics and vision, food safety, extended producer responsibility and unit-level serialisation with GS1 codes. Packaging Technology Today adds further programme topics, such as predictive maintenance, AI and 2D coding with GS1 Sunrise 2027 on the horizon, plus a pavilion devoted to workforce development.
Among the exhibitors, one of the major robot manufacturers, FANUC, has previewed on its website what it will bring: three collaborative robots linking vision-guided picking, label verification, case packing and palletising in a single workflow; a palletising cobot with 3D vision, dual-case handling and a 40 kg payload; and a demonstration in which the robot turns spoken instructions into movements using generative AI.
What it means for a packaging plant
The show is American, but the problem it puts centre stage is the same in any European plant: the end of the line is where people are hardest to find and where the work is most repetitive and physically demanding. Case packing, checking and palletising are often manual tasks next to an automatic filler, and when staff are short, that is where the line slows down.
What is interesting about Chicago is not a single robot, but the trend towards combining in one cell several tasks that used to be handled separately. If the robot building the pallet also checks with a camera that the label and code are correct, the last quality check before dispatch no longer depends on a quick glance at the end of the shift. And if the cell logs its stops and their causes, the end of the line stops being a black box in the OEE calculation.
That said, these demonstrations are worth viewing through a plant engineer's eyes. A demo runs one format at a pace designed for the show; a real line has product changeovers, cases arriving skewed, pallets of varying quality and stoppages upstream. A palletising cobot performs well when line speed, case weight and pallet patterns match its capacity; otherwise the bottleneck simply moves. Before any investment in automation with cobots, the sensible step is to measure the line: how many cases per minute really come off it, how many format changes there are each day and how much time is lost today at the end of the line.
Five questions to take to the show (or to any supplier)
- Your data, not the brochure's: bring your real line speed, case weights and dimensions, pallet patterns and number of SKUs.
- The changeover: ask to see it. How long it takes and who can do it on the night shift matters more than top speed.
- Verification before the pallet: if the cell reads labels or codes, ask what it does with an error: does it reject the case, stop the line or alert someone?
- Safety of the whole application: a collaborative robot does not make a cell safe on its own; the risk assessment covers the load, the gripper and the surroundings.
- The data it provides: stops with their cause, counters and alarms, and how they reach your systems (OPC UA, Modbus TCP, SQL).
TIVOX will be in Chicago. We will attend PACK EXPO International as visitors, to see these cells up close and put the questions above to the manufacturers. If you are going too and would like to meet at the show to talk about your line, get in touch and we will find a time.
Trade shows show where technology is heading; the decision is made with the numbers from your own line. If you are thinking about automating your end of line, let's talk.
