Portion and plate variable food components into cook-chill meal trays
In Elior's central kitchens, prepared hot and cold components (rice, pasta, mashed/pureed vegetables, sauces, proteins, salads, garnishes) must be portioned by weight and deposited into individual liaison-froide meal trays before sealing and chilling. The task involves scooping/grasping deformable, sticky, variable-density food, controlling portion mass, and placing it neatly into a tray compartment without smearing edges or contaminating the seal zone — repeated across tens of thousands of trays per site per day (single new sites run 25,000-35,000 meals/day). It sits mid-line, downstream of bulk cooking (kettles, ovens, féculent cookers) and upstream of tray sealing, conditioning and cold storage. It is hard for a robot because food has no fixed geometry, clumps and shears unpredictably, varies batch to batch, and portion accuracy plus presentation both matter; current Elior automation here is limited to dosing/dispensing of pourable items (e.g. automatic sauce dosers), leaving solid/semi-solid plating manual. 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.
What the task is
RESEARCHED · our reconstructionIn Elior's central kitchens, prepared hot and cold components (rice, pasta, mashed/pureed vegetables, sauces, proteins, salads, garnishes) must be portioned by weight and deposited into individual liaison-froide meal trays before sealing and chilling. The task involves scooping/grasping deformable, sticky, variable-density food, controlling portion mass, and placing it neatly into a tray compartment without smearing edges or contaminating the seal zone — repeated across tens of thousands of trays per site per day (single new sites run 25,000-35,000 meals/day). It sits mid-line, downstream of bulk cooking (kettles, ovens, féculent cookers) and upstream of tray sealing, conditioning and cold storage. It is hard for a robot because food has no fixed geometry, clumps and shears unpredictably, varies batch to batch, and portion accuracy plus presentation both matter; current Elior automation here is limited to dosing/dispensing of pourable items (e.g. automatic sauce dosers), leaving solid/semi-solid plating manual.
Is this the actual task and sequence? What are the real tolerances, cycle rate, and reject criteria, and which steps are today's manual bottleneck? Answering these is what turns this from a researched signal into a validated use case.