Chef Robotics, a San Francisco-based food robotics company, has expanded its AI-driven automation platform to handle tray assembly for meatpacking. The system can assemble raw, frozen and precooked proteins — including pork loin fillets, chicken breasts, steaks, lamb chops, bratwursts and sausage links — onto trays before packaging.
Tray assembly for proteins has been difficult to automate because pieces of meat are irregular in shape, deformable and highly variable in size. A frozen chicken breast, for instance, behaves differently from a fresh pork loin, making it challenging for automation systems to handle proteins reliably at production speeds.
How It Works
Chef built its meatpacking application on its existing piece-picking technology, using computer vision trained on data covering the visual appearance, physical properties and handling characteristics of different protein types. The system makes real-time decisions about how to grasp each piece and where to place it on the tray.
The application introduces three capabilities: the vision system detects each piece’s orientation and reorients it mid-motion to place it at the correct angle; the process runs in a single automated pass without manual intervention; and the system calculates placement offsets from the tray’s center to ensure uniform arrangement across every tray.
Broader Food Assembly Applications
The meatpacking capability builds on Chef’s recent expansion into flatbread-based food assembly, where its robots place ingredients onto tortillas, burger buns, sandwich bread and pizza bases for burrito, wrap, burger and sandwich production lines. The company says its robots have completed more than 101 million servings in production environments.
The meatpacking application is available in the U.S., Canada and the UK under the company’s robotics-as-a-service pricing model, which allows food manufacturers to deploy the technology without large upfront capital investment.
Chef Robotics is an AI-driven food robotics company headquartered in San Francisco.
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