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Food manufacturing is opening up opportunities for humans to oversee and support robotic fleets
What does food manufacturing look like today?
When many people think of manufacturing, they often imagine a highly automated factory with rows upon rows of robots. For the food manufacturing industry, that vision is often far from reality. While low-mix producers (think Nestle and Kellogg’s) have fixed automation available, their high-mix counterparts making prepared meals have only invested in limited forms of automation due to the large number of SKUs that need to be prepared (and by extension, daily changeovers needed).
Since production runs of a SKU can be quite short and ingredients can vary drastically, food manufacturers require the flexibility of human workers to meet their production needs. As a result, limited automation has been introduced ranging from the basics of conveyors to some depositors for items such as sauces.
For manufacturers, this reliance on human labour has come with high and rising costs of human labour as well as difficulties finding and retaining talent. With narrow margins, even small disturbances can quickly impact the bottom line. Similarly, workers find themselves in a cold room environment, performing repetitive tasks and facing a real risk of repetitive strain injuries and long exposure to uncomfortable working conditions.
Forward-thinking leaders in the space today understand this status quo must change in order to stay competitive in the market.
How food manufacturers can leverage modern advancements in AI and robotics to transform their factories
Recognising these challenges, industry leaders and technology startups have invested in AI and robotics to reshape how these manual processes can be done. While traditional automation has limited sensing capabilities and often only a single action to be completed, these new systems are capable of adapting to their environment. This feat is possible by using cameras and other sensors to capture a snapshot of the surrounding environment, and using recent advances in AI to understand those inputs and execute the task in response.
These robots can now match the adaptability and flexibility of human workers and can handle multiple SKUs.
Chef Robotics, a leader in the food robotics space, is building towards this future, and serves customers across the prepared meals space. Chef’s systems were built to drop in for a typical human workstation found on production lines, and occupy a similar amount of space. With state-of-the-art AI models, the system can operate across different conveyors, and can adapt to various bowl or tray types and track them as they move along conveyors. The robot can even account for skewed tray placement as a human worker would.
Changeover is also a straightforward process. To begin the next production run for the next SKU, operators simply have to select the next recipe and swap the robot’s utensil, load the food as they would for a human operator, and press start. The system automatically handles the rest, and can serve foods ranging from pastas to sauces, to diced chicken and leafy greens.
Importantly, these new robotic solutions can adapt to variation in the ingredient to get the correct weight. Across the length of a production day, these robots are able to more accurately portion food into each meal than a human would. As an added benefit, they capture data on every food deposit, ranging from weights to images, providing a comprehensive quality control data set to pull from. Manufacturers are finding that this consistency not only drives good consumer outcomes by avoiding under-portioning, but also generates notable yield savings.
As for deployments, many operations leaders are understandably hesitant to introduce large changes that may disrupt their operations. By taking a work station approach, manufacturers can choose to implement a gradual rollout with humans and robots working side by side, and can continue to add robotic stations to transition to increasingly automated lines.
Looking ahead
Robotics is seeing a leap in capabilities driven by recent advances in AI, and these improvements will continue to bring benefits to the food manufacturing industry.
Importantly, startups in the space like Chef Robotics are finding that as more production data is collected, additional ingredients can be run and baseline performance continues to improve over time. For brands and co-manufacturers, this means more value can be captured, and many find they can add more stations or expand to additional lines.
This progress is not just transforming food manufacturing but also creating new roles for human workers. Much like the warehouse robotics revolution, food manufacturing is opening up opportunities for humans to oversee and support robotic fleets. These roles allow for upskilling, moving workers away from repetitive tasks and into more supervisory roles.
Ultimately, these improvements in robotics and AI are driving a future where food manufacturing achieves higher quality at lower costs. These advancements translate to benefits not only for manufacturers but also for end consumers, delivering better products and more sustainable processes.
