How Sunbasket Increased Consistency by 25%
Beyond increasing consistency, Sunbakset was able to achieve 17% higher throughput and 10% higher labor productivity using Chef robots.
About Sunbasket
Sunbasket is a meal delivery company with the mission to empower people to live their healthiest lives. Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for Sunbasket’s prepared meals has skyrocketed, but the scarcity of food assembly labor has constrained the company’s growth.
“My ideal solution is very similar to the solution that has been presented to me by Chef Robotics. The robots can run consistently all day, they can run multiple shifts, and they can scoop and deposit anything just as well as people can.”
Challenges
Before using Chef, Sunbasket found it challenging to hire and retain workers to keep up with the rising demand for its products.
In the COVID-19 pandemic, Sunbasket experienced much higher demand along with a critical shortage of workers. Sunbasket’s meal assembly lines required workers to perform repetitive motions in a cold room at 34°F. To overcome staffing gaps on its meal assembly lines, the company needed to reallocate workers from other parts of the plant (such as preparation, cooking, and packaging) to food assembly.
In search of a solution to its ever-increasing labor shortage, Sunbasket leaned into automation. However, traditional automation solutions such as vertical form fillers, auger-based dispensers, multi-head dispensers, and vibratory feeds weren’t able to accommodate Sunbasket’s high product mix with hundreds of stock-keeping units (SKUs) and short changeover times with seven to eight changeovers per shift.
As a result, Sunbasket needed an automation solution that could address its labor shortage, handle various ingredients, trays, portion sizes, and placement aesthetics, achieve high throughput and consistency, and support quick changeovers.
Chef’s approach
Since traditional automation wasn’t flexible enough, Sunbasket decided to partner with Chef Robotics on a more flexible automation solution that would meet its high standards for ingredient compatibility, throughput, placement aesthetics, and changeover time. Equipped with AI-based perception, a collaborative robot arm, and proprietary utensils, Chef robots maximize SKU compatibility while maintaining product quality, increasing throughput, and maximizing uptime.
- AI-based perception
- Modular and portable
- Collaborative
- Flexible
- Real-time conveyor integration
- Fully deployed in two weeks
- <10-min. changeovers
“Chef is giving us the opportunity to automate our production lines with many different ingredients and flexible and efficient portioning. Over- and under-portioning can be devastating to our food production, so Chef’s accuracy gives us better control of food cost and waste.”
Impact
Using Chef robots, Sunbasket has achieved 25% more consistent deposit weights, 17% higher throughput, and 10% higher labor productivity.
Chef robots have achieved 25% more consistent deposit weights on average compared to workers. The higher consistency allows Sunbasket to minimize giveaway, maximize yield, and increase overall revenue potential for its operations.
Sunbasket saw 17% higher throughput on Chef-made meals compared to the same meals when assembled by workers only. The higher throughput has helped Sunbasket increase output to keep up with growing demand.
On production lines that used to require 10 workers to operate, each Chef robot replaces one line worker, freeing them up for less repetitive tasks in other parts of the plant.
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