Singulate and place soft, sticky dried fruit (apricots, figs, mulberries) for trays/assortments

Cibo Vita directly sources and packages large volumes of whole dried fruit — Turkish apricots, figs, mulberries, tart cherries — which are deformable, tacky, and highly variable in size and shape. A dexterous task here is singulating individual pieces from a clumped mass and placing them into trays, clamshells, or mixed assortments without tearing, deforming, or grabbing two stuck-together pieces. The work sits upstream of final pouch/tray packing and is the kind of variable, fiddly handling typically done by hand on assembly lines. It is hard for a robot because the objects stick to each other and to the gripper, change geometry under pressure, and offer no rigid registration features, so a fixed-force grasp either crushes them or fails to separate clumps. No specific volume figure for this task was disclosed, though the company runs 1,000+ SKUs and a high-volume operation. We identified this through our own research; we have not confirmed the specifics with the customer directly. This page is our researched read — a starting point for that conversation.