How Cafe Spice Boosted Output by 2-3x Using Chef Robotics
Using Chef’s robots, Cafe Spice was able to ease labor shortage constraints, lower food giveaway by 67%, and boost output by 2-3x .
About Cafe Spice
Cafe Spice is a food manufacturer specializing in Indian and South Asian-inspired meals. The company sells a line of ready-to-eat meals under the Cafe Spice brand, available at major retailers like Whole Foods, Kroger, and Costco. It also supplies private-label and co-manufactured products to major retailers, foodservice providers, and institutional customers across the United States.
In 2024, Cafe Spice opened a new production facility in Beacon, New York, expanding its manufacturing capacity to meet increased demand from its growing network of partners and customers.
Challenges
In addition to the challenges below, Cafe Spice’s high quality standards and strict requirements for placement and presentation of its meals led to food giveaway and yield losses. For example, to avoid underserving customers, line workers often overportioned meals, resulting in significant giveway.
In order to meet the target weight, workers needed to fill the two-compartment trays to the top, which frequently led to spillage or spillover of curry into rice and required another worker to wipe trays before they reach the tray sealing machine.
The manual production setup—using tables instead of conveyors, with workers manually shifting bowls down the line—often capped throughput at around 12 entrées per minute. This limited facility output made it difficult for Cafe Spice to keep up with growing demand, scale its operations, and grow revenue. Even with the adoption of conveyors, Cafe Spice felt that worker pace was limiting throughput.
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, New York became a more challenging environment to hire and retain workers. Cafe Spice faced labor shortages and rising overhead costs—including an increased minimum wage and turnover—which challenged its ability to meet production demand and maintain profit margins.
Cafe Spice’s high quality standards and strict requirements for placement and presentation led to significant food giveaway. To avoid underserving customers, line workers often over-portioned meals. Workers needed to fill Cafe Spice’s two-compartment trays to the top to meet the target weight, which frequently led to spillage or spillover of curry into rice and required another worker to wipe trays at the end of the line.
Challenges
To solve its giveaway problem, increase yield,
and boost output, Cafe Spice decided to invest in a conveyor system alongside Chef robots. Unlike traditional automation, Chef robots can serve Cafe Spice’s various SKUs in production after a quick recipe selection and utensil change. In addition to accurate placement, Chef robots collect precise weight data for every deposit to achieve consistency and reduce food giveaway. Finally, the Chef team developed a new utensil designed explicitly for curries to minimize the risk of spilling and consistently handle meat chunks suspended in curries.
Impact
Cafe Spice has seen significant output, yield, and worker productivity improvements using Chef robots. After deploying four robots initially, the company quickly deployed four more to partially automate two production lines. Now, Cafe Spice is planning to onboard eight more robots, fully automating both production lines end-to-end.
Before using Chef, each of Cafe Spice’s production lines produced 10-15 trays per minute. With Chef robots and the new conveyor system, the company now achieves a throughput of up to 30 trays per minute on average, resulting in 2-3 times higher output. The increased throughput has allowed Cafe Spice to consolidate some of its production lines, resulting in millions of dollars in additional revenue potential.
Previously, Cafe Spice required 8-10 workers per production line for its meal assembly process. With Chef, the number of dedicated workers on each line has decreased to 3-4 people, delivering a 60% increase in labor productivity on average. Cafe Spice leverages the freed-up workers in other areas of its operations, which had previously remained understaffed.
The acceptance rate for Chef-made meals is 91%, compared to a 75% acceptance rate for worker-made meals. These consistency improvements directly affect Cafe Spice’s overall product quality, as Chef robots are able to accurately place ingredients into the company’s two-compartment trays. They have also allowed Cafe Spice to reduce food giveaway by 67%, resulting in an estimated $72K in annual yield savings.
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