Chef Robotics, a provider of physical AI for the food industry, announced that its robots can automate tray assembly for meatpacking by assembling pieces of meat onto trays before packaging. The application reportedly handles raw, frozen and precooked proteins such as pork loin fillets, chicken breasts, steaks, lamb chops, bratwursts and sausage links.
The variability, irregularity and deformability qualities of meats make it challenging for automation systems to reliably handle proteins at production speeds, leaving food manufacturers dependent on manual labor.
To address this, Chef built its meatpacking application on its existing piece-picking capability, leveraging Chef's AI and computer vision system trained on large volumes of data covering the visual appearance, physical properties and handling characteristics of different protein types. This enables Chef robots to make real-time decisions about how to grasp each piece of meat and where to place it on the tray.
The meatpacking application introduces three capabilities:
Because pieces of meat can sit at any angle in the pan, Chef's vision system detects each piece's orientation and reorients it mid-motion to place it at the exact angle required on the tray, regardless of its original position. Some SKUs, for example, require pieces to be placed at a 90-degree angle to achieve a consistent, retail-ready presentation.
Chef robots can complete it in a single automated pass without manual intervention.
Since pieces need to be consistently spaced and evenly arranged across every tray, Chef's vision system identifies the tray's center and calculates predefined offsets for each piece, ensuring a uniform arrangement.
For food manufacturers, the meatpacking application offers higher throughput, lower labor dependency and consistent portion presentation across shifts without requiring changes to existing production line infrastructure.
Chef's meatpacking capability is available in the U.S., Canada and the UK and is included as part of Chef's robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) pricing model.
