Marking the most recent addition to our ingredient lineup, Chef robots can now serve leafy greens such as romaine and iceberg lettuce, slaw, spinach, spring mix, and kale for fresh food manufacturers across the US and Canada.
Leafy greens present unique challenges due to their delicate, easily bruised texture and their high volume-to-weight ratio in fresh, ready-to-eat meals such as salads. To enable Chef robots to serve leafy greens and pave the way for similar ingredients in the future, we made the following hardware and software improvements to our latest module:
How we enabled Chef robots to serve leafy greens
- Larger hotel pan capacity: Unlike denser ingredients like grains, proteins, or sauces, leafy greens take up a substantial amount of space relative to their weight. Because of their light and airy nature, leafy greens require a much larger hotel pan to maintain efficiency on the production line. Our engineering team freed up vertical space to host a larger hotel pan inside our robots by moving electronic components to the bottom of our latest module. This allows Chef robots to serve high volumes of leafy greens from a single hotel pan, reducing the need for frequent pan swaps.
- New utensil design: The Chef team also created a new specialty utensil with longer stems and smooth edges to accommodate the deeper hotel pans and handle delicate leafy greens without tearing them.
- Engineered motion profiles: On the AI and software side, we engineered new trajectories for clean and controlled placements, adjusted tool closing forces for gentle but effective picks, and tuned utensil opening speeds to account for the lightweight nature of greens and avoid flinging. We also modified ingredient tracking speed as leafy greens fall and behave differently than denser ingredients.
Leafy greens are already running in production at one of Chef’s largest customers in the US, where Chef robots have served hundreds of thousands of servings of leafy greens. The ingredient is now widely available to current customers who wish to expand their meal assembly capabilities and to new customers who want to get started with intelligent meal assembly automation.
Chef robots have a wide range of ingredient capabilities in addition to handling lightweight, high-volume ingredients like leafy greens. Contact us to learn more about the types of ingredients Chef robots can handle.
