Chef Robotics, a leader in physical AI for the food industry, announced that Chef robots can now automate tray assembly for produce packing. The application places discrete items, such as oranges, apples and pears, into clamshell packages and snack boxes, and portions scoopable produce, such as corn and peas, into trays before packaging.

These applications support retail grab-and-go products, airplane meal kits, hospital and care facility meals and school lunch boxes.

Produce packing has historically been difficult to automate. Unlike grains or sauces, whole fruits and vegetables are rigid, irregular and vary in size, surface texture, and placement in a bin. At the same time, these items are packaged in containers such as retail clamshells, snack boxes, and portioned meal trays, which require strict placement consistency and presentation quality. 

This variability has made it challenging for automation systems to handle produce items reliably at production speeds, leaving food manufacturers dependent on manual labor.

To address this, Chef built its produce packing application on two existing capabilities—piece-picking and scooping—depending on the ingredient. For discrete items such as whole fruits like oranges, apples, pears, and kiwis, the piece-picking capability uses AI-powered computer vision to assess each item's position, shape, and orientation in real time, enabling Chef robots to choose how to pick and place it precisely into the tray.

For scoopable produce such as corn and peas, the scooping capability portions ingredients by weight and places them accurately using Chef's tray-tracking vision system. Both capabilities are built on Chef's physical AI models trained across diverse real-world production environments, allowing Chef robots to adapt to variability in how produce sits in the pan with no pre-sorting or fixed pan placement required.

For food manufacturers, the produce packing application offers higher throughput, lower labor dependency, and consistent portion presentation across shifts. The capability runs on Chef's existing robotic hardware and software, allowing manufacturers to deploy it without making any infrastructure changes to their production lines.

About Chef Robotics
Chef is the first company to have commercialized a scalable AI-driven food robotics solution. With over 104 million servings made in production, Chef leverages ChefOS, an AI platform for food manipulation, to offer a Robotics-as-a-Service solution that helps industry-leading food companies increase production volume and meet demand. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Chef aims to empower humans to do what humans do best by accelerating the advent of intelligent machines.