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Robots Help Meal Kit Company Keep Pace With Ambitious Production Goals

E-commerce giant Intelligent Foods utilizes the CR3 system from Chef Robotics to increase accuracy, speed, and volume on the line while saving labor.

Meal Kits DTC e-commerce Sunbasket
Sunbasket is one of several direct-to-consumer meal kit brands under the Intelligent Foods umbrella, and the company also serves as a contract manufacturer for many private label meal kits too.
Intelligent Foods

During the pandemic, direct-to-consumer meal kit sales skyrocketed as consumers sheltering in place took advantage of the door-to-door convenience and nutritional variety that meal kits offer, saving them a trip to the grocery store and time spent preparing meals from scratch. Those sales continued long after the pandemic ended, with worldwide meal kit revenue expected to grow past $17 billion in 2023 and forecast to exceed $25 billion by 2027, according to Statista. By 2030, that number is predicted to reach $64.4 billion.

Based on those robust projections, it’s not surprising that Intelligent Foods, one of the country’s largest meal kit companies, has expanded operations to grow its customer base. Intelligent Foods has the brands Sunbasket, Gobble, and Prüvit under its umbrella, and also handles contract work for other meal kit companies in Intelligent Foods’ two processing facilities in California and New Jersey—96,000 and 140,000 sq ft, respectively.

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“During Covid, the meal kit space became overpopulated,” says Ramiro Gomez, general manager of Intelligent Foods West, who started at Sunbasket in 2017. “We needed to find a way to be more competitive in acquiring more customers, so we decided to manufacture not just for our brands but for multiple brands, which allows us to compete for a bigger market share. Now, other meal kit companies can use our manufacturing assets, which helps them save money by not having to buy those assets themselves.”

Robotics e-commerce meal kits SunbasketIntelligent Foods has a total of 12 Chef Robotics CR3 pick-and-place robots stationed alongside workers in its two production facilities in California and New Jersey.Intelligent Foods

As Intelligent Foods expanded its production plants to accommodate new business, their need to assemble a wide variety of orders faster and more accurately was vital, especially while trying to navigate the ongoing labor crunch impacting the industry. To help solve this challenge, the company turned to automation, and Chef Robotics’ AI-enabled CR3 flexible robotics system, enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) for high-mix food manufacturers. Intelligent Foods puts the robots alongside employees on the line, all working as one to fulfill a steady stream of orders.

“Making meal kits and assembling ready-to-eat meals requires anywhere from four to 15 assembly lines running at once, depending on our workload,” says Gomez. “Chef Robotics was able to help us because there is a labor shortage. For example, between Sunbasket and Gobble, we’ll create about 36 different recipes in a week, and we don’t reuse the same ingredients, so that means quick changeovers are essential. Chef Robotics has a very simple system with a robotic arm that can accurately portion ingredients, and when one meal assembly is done, we just switch over a little piece of tooling on the end of the robot arm, and we’re ready to go. Compare that to a person on the line having to change their entire PPE every time, and it’s a lot less cumbersome.”

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