Café Spice Transforms Production and Profitability with a RaaS Solution

For example, each Chef robot occupies roughly the same space as a human worker and fits directly into the line without costly retrofits. Robots meet ISO 10218 standards for safe operation alongside human workers, enabling blended work cells where humans perform tasks like tray nesting, wiping rims, and loading packaging, while robots handle the repetitive, high-precision portioning.

Chef robot camera visualization with bounding boxes.Café Spice / Chef RoboticsThe system enables rapid changeovers because it requires only 120V AC power and a pneumatic quick-disconnect for operation. Each unit is on castors that allow it to be moved where needed on the line with leveling feet to secure the unit in place. Café Spice can use a proprietary quick utensil changer to switch between SKUs—say, from rice to curry—in under 10 minutes. This is essential for a high-SKU manufacturer where downtime directly impacts output. Chef also engineered a custom utensil to handle varying curry densities and suspended proteins without breaking down textures or damaging rice grains.

This means Café Spice can deploy robots quickly; Chef’s units were running in production within two weeks of conveyor installation.

AI-based perception courtesy of a dual RGB and depth camera system creates a “topographical map” of food in pans, allowing the robot to choose optimal scoop points. This is critical for handling ingredients like chicken tikka masala with large protein pieces or dal with lentils suspended in sauce. Integrated scales weigh each deposit in real time, making adjustments in as little as three seconds without halting the line.

The robots then place food into multiple compartments within a tray, ensuring clean separation of rice and curry. This preserves Café Spice’s visual presentation and reduces the need for manual cleaning before sealing.

The continuous weighing feature eliminated the need for periodic spot checks, while ingredient-level data analytics gave Café Spice real-time visibility into every deposit, accessible from anywhere. Says Felix, “It’s hygienic, accurate, and gives us insight into every deposit for trend analysis.”

Business model and deployment approach

Instead of a traditional capital purchase, Café Spice adopted Chef Robotics through a robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) subscription. This model includes hardware and software, all upgrades, field support, and maintenance for a flat monthly fee. It also allowed the company to start small—deploying four robots—before scaling to eight and now sixteen across two fully automated lines.

The RaaS approach reduced financial risk, avoided large upfront costs, and provided the flexibility to expand capacity in stages. This incremental rollout also gave Café Spice time to integrate automation into its workforce culture, redeploying rather than replacing staff.

From constraint to capability

The impact went beyond the numbers. Automating portioning removed one of the biggest sources of repetitive motion injuries. The mobility of Chef robots gave production managers the ability to reconfigure lines as demand shifted, without expensive reengineering.

Bhageria emphasizes that this kind of flexibility is key in food manufacturing. “Many plants have the demand; they just lack the labor,” he says. “By increasing throughput 2–3x without more people, you not only meet demand but often create more jobs anyway.”

For Felix, the transformation is about building resilience: “Automation wasn’t about replacing people; it was about scaling our business, protecting our workers, and ensuring product quality at every step.”

By integrating AI-based robotics upstream in their process, Café Spice has shown that high-mix food production—once considered a poor fit for automation—can achieve the same precision, flexibility, and throughput as more uniform manufacturing, without compromising the culinary standards that define the brand.