Chef Launches Piece-Picking Capability to Automate Individual Food Items Assembly
Chef Robotics, a leader in AI-enabled robotic meal assembly for the food industry, has announced a new piece-picking capability that enables food manufacturers to automate delicate food items such as chicken breasts, cutlets, pork chops, burgers, patties, sauce cups, dressing packets, baked goods and other products that require individual handling.
Until now, Chef robots have focused on ingredients that can be scooped and portioned by weight, including mac and cheese, rice and leafy greens. However, many production lines also process delicate items that cannot be scooped and must be handled delicately. These ingredients need to be identified individually and placed in specific quantities and orientations in trays or bowls. Traditionally, manufacturers have relied on line workers to pick and place these items manually, a repetitive and physically demanding task that has become increasingly difficult to staff amid turnover rates exceeding 150% in food manufacturing.
The new piece-picking capability automates the delicate handling of individual food items from unstructured totes. It uses AI-powered segmentation and detection models combined with RGBD camera data to identify each piece in real time, determine its surface plane and normal vector, and calculate the ideal picking pose. A utensil then precisely lifts and places each item into the correct compartment of a tray or bowl.
The system is powered by a custom-designed, food-safe, vacuum-powered utensil that uses the venturi effect to generate suction without drawing moisture into the system, preserving ingredient quality and protecting the pneumatic components. Multiple quick-change attachments support different ingredient types, from hard frozen patties and cutlets to softer items such as pancakes and baked goods, ensuring gentle handling across applications.
Chef robots can pick items from unstructured containers at any angle, adapting to each piece’s position rather than requiring products to lie flat. During deposition, items can be placed in a specific orientation, such as laying a chicken breast flat or positioning a sauce cup upright.
For manufacturers, piece-picking expands the range of SKUs that can be automated, increases robot utilisation across production lines and provides a 1:1 worker equivalent for delicate item handling. The capability is compatible with existing Chef robots and can be deployed with a simple utensil swap, without additional hardware infrastructure.
Unlike single-ingredient automation solutions, Chef’s approach is flexible across multiple products. The AI model can be retrained quickly to switch between different ingredients. Some customers are already using the capability on fresh and frozen meal lines, and the solution is now widely available to food manufacturers seeking to automate gentle individual item handling.