Chef Robotics and JBT Marel's Proseal are partnering to provide a joint solution for meal assembly automation, allowing food manufacturers to flexibly automate the assembly and packaging of fresh and frozen ready-to-eat (RTE) and ready-to-cook (RTC) meals.

Food manufacturers have traditionally found meal assembly challenging to automate, especially in high-mix production environments that require different stock-keeping units (SKUs) on the same production line with quick changeovers. Chef Robotics aims addressing this challenge with robots that occupy the same footprint as a worker and operate safely alongside humans while picking and placing various ingredients into trays on a conveyor. Utilizing an AI-enabled perception system, Chef robots detect trays and place ingredients while meeting high throughput requirements.

"Food companies are under more pressure than ever to reduce costs and increase throughput while maintaining flexibility," says Chef Robotics CEO Rajat Bhageria. "By partnering with Proseal, we can deliver a seamless automation solution that goes beyond meal assembly to include sealing and packaging. Food manufacturers with high-mix, high-volume production environments can now handle food assembly and packaging with the same precision and flexibility at a fraction of the labor cost."

The joint solution combines Chef's AI focus and flexibility with Proseal's tray sealing machines and packaging solutions to provide food manufacturers with an end-to-end solution for their meal assembly and packaging needs.

"Chef brings a next-generation approach to food automation with its AI and vision-based robotics platform," says Chris Mills, director of engineering at Proseal. "Speed and flexibility are two important differentiators for Proseal as well as Chef, so I instantly knew we would want to create a partnership. Together, we can help our customers automate more production lines while remaining agile in the ever-changing food manufacturing market."