中文At Anuga FoodTec India 2026, ABB’s Machine Automation Division, known as B&R, arrived with a deceptively simple message. The next productivity gains in food and beverage manufacturing will come less from faster individual machines and more from connecting the line as a whole. Under the stewardship of Pratip Samanta, regional managing director for Southern and Eastern Asia, B&R staged a showcase that brought together conventional automation, mechatronics and artificial intelligence, but the headline was the question of how automation lifts the productivity of the complete production line rather than isolated equipment.
B&R divided its portfolio into two halves for the exhibition. The first covered conventional automation, control products, human-machine interfaces and motion, while the second highlighted the company’s mechatronics portfolio. Within motion, the ACOPOS D1 single-axis drive stood out as a deliberately cost-balanced product, manufactured in China and aimed at applications less demanding than B&R’s higher-end offerings. The idea behind ACOPOS D1 is being competitive in segments with smaller, less critical applications, Samanta explained, framing it as a product for price-sensitive markets where value per dollar matters most.
The mechatronics story was anchored by ACOPOS 6D, B&R’s magnetic-levitation conveying technology. Samanta pointed to its relevance across food and beverage, consumer products and beauty, where filling, labelling, capping and dispatch can be consolidated into a compact, reconfigurable conveying system. By moving products on independently controlled movers, manufacturers reduce mechanical changeover and gain a flexible transport layer that adapts to multiple product formats on a single line, a capability that resonates strongly with the high-mix realities of modern food production.
B&R also used the show to surface its AI-assisted engineering work. Automation Studio Copilot and the company’s Agentic AI Bridge are designed to support engineers across the automation lifecycle, from scaffolding programs and projects to completing them. These tools reflect a broader industry turn toward software-defined automation, where open architectures make systems more adaptable to specific customer requirements and machines become increasingly IT-oriented and AI-enabled.
For Samanta, however, the more notable shift is strategic. Machine builders have historically obsessed over machine automation, yet real productivity now requires end-of-line automation too. In order to gain the full productivity of the line, end-of-line automation is very important, he said. That reframing changes how builders approach software and connectivity, pushing them to treat the line as an integrated system rather than a collection of optimised islands.
The harder problem, he noted, is not collecting more data, because highly automated plants already generate plenty, but preventing data silos. How we should ensure that the data silos are not there, how we could bring the data in a common platform, Samanta said, is the question that matters. To that end, B&R demonstrated an edge solution intended to make machine data available for analysis and actionable insight, moving the goal from individual-machine productivity toward whole-plant efficiency.
Samanta sees India tracking the same automation trajectory as Europe, with one crucial caveat. The market’s cost sensitivity makes price-to-performance the decisive variable. Automation is a part and parcel for Indian customers as well, and the price-to-performance is something which matters, he said. B&R’s presence at Anuga FoodTec comes as the division deepens its focus on packaging, pharma, medical devices and related industries, and Samanta reported strong show response, with conversations moving beyond machine automation toward line efficiency and broader production-environment support.
For food and beverage producers under pressure to lift throughput while controlling cost, that connected, line-level proposition may prove the more durable sell than any single faster machine. As margins tighten and labour grows scarce, the ability to orchestrate filling, labelling, capping and dispatch as one intelligent system, with data flowing freely between stations, is exactly the kind of productivity story that resonates with plant managers balancing capital discipline against rising expectations. The transition will not happen overnight, but the direction of travel is clear.
Source: This article is a reworking of reporting originally published by The Packman (thepackman.in) on 8 October 2026.
The strategic emphasis on line-level automation arrives at an opportune moment for India’s food and beverage sector, one of the fastest-growing packaged-consumption markets in the world. As domestic demand for processed and packaged food rises, producers are under pressure to lift output while controlling the labour and waste that have historically capped margins. In that context, B&R’s argument that end-of-line automation matters as much as the machine itself is more than a sales pitch; it reflects a maturation of how Indian manufacturers think about return on automation. Where early adopters chased individual machine speed, the current generation is increasingly judged on overall equipment effectiveness across the whole line. The magnetic-levitation conveying concept, long familiar in high-end pharmaceutical and electronics plants, is now being pitched to mainstream food producers as the mechanism for that flexibility. If the cost curve continues to fall, as Samanta suggests it must for the Indian market, the technology could move from showcase novelty to standard specification on the next generation of filling and packing lines.
