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Chef robots can now automate tray assembly for produce packing. This includes placing discrete items, such as whole fruits like oranges, apples, and pears, into clamshell packages and snack boxes, and portioning scoopable ingredients, such as corn and peas, into trays before packaging. These fresh produce packaging applications support retail grab-and-go products, airplane meal kits, hospital and care facility meals, and school lunch boxes.
Produce packing automation is more challenging than it seems. 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 (retail clamshells, snack boxes, and portioned meal trays), which require strict placement consistency and presentation. This has made it challenging to handle produce items reliably at production speeds.
How Chef’s AI-powered food robotics handles produce packing
Chef robots handle produce packing using two existing capabilities—piece-picking and scooping—depending on the ingredient. For discrete items such as whole fruits (oranges, apples, kiwis, and pears), the piece-picking capability uses AI-powered computer vision to assess each item’s position, shape, and orientation in real time, enabling the robot 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 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.
Three AI-powered placement capabilities for produce packing
Packing produce requires more than simply picking and placing ingredients into trays. Depending on the SKU, operators may need to ensure items land in designated positions, completely fill a tray in one pass, or stack neatly to maximize pack density. To meet these demands, Chef robots provide three distinct placement capabilities for produce packing:
- Offset placement: Chef’s camera system identifies the exact center of each tray or clamshell. This center point acts as a guide for placing each piece of produce. The robot puts every item at a set distance from the center. For example, in a pack with three pieces of fruit, Chef robots can be configured to put the first item in the middle, the second 10 centimeters to the left, and the third 10 centimeters to the right. This ensures every pack looks uniform and ready for retail display, no matter how the trays are positioned on the conveyor belt.
- Multi-item tray assembly: Chef robots can place pieces of fruit into the same packaging container (such as a tray or a clamshell, which is a hinged plastic box) in a single automated step, completing the full assembly without any manual intervention between picks.
- Stacked placement: For deep trays that require more items to fit into a smaller footprint, Chef robots can arrange produce in layers. For example, if a tray is designed to hold eight pieces, the robot places four in a bottom row and then adds four more on top, carefully stacking them so that the lower layer doesn’t get damaged.
What this means for food manufacturers
Workers have long staffed produce packing lines to sort, place, and fill items by hand on fast-moving conveyors. This repetitive, physically tiring work makes reliable staffing difficult. Chef’s robotic produce packing and clamshell packaging automation solution alleviates this challenge. The capability runs on Chef’s existing robotic hardware and software, allowing food manufacturers to deploy it without making any infrastructure changes to their production lines.
What’s next
As more Chef customers use our produce-packing capability, we will continue to expand this solution to cover a broader range of ingredients and packaging formats.
Interested in learning more about Chef’s capabilities? Contact us to discover the full range of use cases for which industry-leading food manufacturers have adopted Chef robots.
