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Chef Robotics AI models can help automate produce packing
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Tuesday, 28 April, 2026, 14 : 00 PM [IST]
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San Francisco, USA
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Chef Robotics announced that its 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 labour.
To address this, it 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 its 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 tray-tracking vision system. Both capabilities are built on AI models trained across diverse real-world production environments, allowing its robots to adapt to variability in how produce sits in the pan with no pre-sorting or fixed pan placement required.
The produce packing application introduces three distinct placement capabilities. First, its camera system identifies the exact centre of each tray or clamshell and uses it as a reference point for picking any item. Each item is deposited at a predefined offset from the centre. For example, in a three-fruit arrangement, the robot places the first piece at the centre, the second 10 centi-meters to the left, and the third 10 centi-meters to the right, ensuring every pack has a uniform, retail-ready layout regardless of how trays arrive on the conveyor. Second, the robots can place multiple pieces of produce into the same packaging container in a single automated pass, completing the full tray assembly without any manual intervention between picks. Third, for deep trays that require items to be stacked, the robots arrange produce in layers. For example, the robots can be configured to place four pieces across the bottom, then carefully stack four more on top, without damaging the layer below.
For food manufacturers, the produce packing application offers higher throughput, lower labour dependency, and consistent portion presentation across shifts. The capability runs on its existing robotic hardware and software, allowing manufacturers to deploy it without making any infrastructure changes to their production lines.
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