Tortillas Nagual said it has added a second collaborative robot on its corn-tortilla packaging line at Barberà del Vallès (Barcelona), Spain. In an Aug. 31, 2026, company post, the plant describes a Universal Robots UR3e — matching its first cobot from about two years earlier — dedicated to pick-and-place of cartoncillos (small carton inserts) into each tortilla pack.
Nagual hired integrator ATX Robotics (Grupo Aritex) for a custom cell with a dual vacuum gripper that places two cartoncillos per cycle onto packs on the conveyor, plus metal stack columns for the inserts. Tooling can be swapped so the cobots cover any of the eight corn-tortilla models the company sells. Specs cited for the UR3e include a 500 mm reach and 3 kg payload, compact enough that the plant says it needed no major layout redesign.
Management frames the move as shifting people off repetitive insert placement toward higher-value work (machine supervision, film-reel changes, QA). Headcount has grown to 36, the company says, and 2025 output was 21.07 million tortillas amid rising retail and foodservice demand. The project received support via a subsidy from Catalonia’s Departament d’Empresa i Treball.
For U.S. and export-oriented tortilla plants, the takeaway is a concrete secondary-packaging automation pattern — not a U.S. CapEx announcement. Read Tortillas Nagual’s post for integrator detail and the company’s no-layoff framing.
Tortillas Nagual Universal Robots ATX Robotics