Pack delicate fresh-cut fruit pieces into retail clamshells/trays

On the fresh-cut line, individual cut pieces (pineapple spears and chunks, melon cubes, mango, kiwi slices, grapes, citrus segments) must be picked from a flow of post-cut product and placed or layered into retail clamshells, bowls, and trays at portion weight. The objects are soft, wet, slippery, fragile, and highly variable in size and shape; they bruise, crush, tear, and stick to grippers, and a piece that looks intact can still be mushy. The task sits downstream of peeling/coring/dicing and upstream of weighing, lidding and labeling. It is hard for a robot because grip force must be modulated per piece to lift without crushing while overcoming slip on a juice-coated surface, and the geometry differs every cycle. Fresh Del Monte runs high-volume fresh-cut operations (e.g., the automated Gonzales plant and its fruit/veg foodservice lines), and the 'porter in the fresh cut division' roles in worker reviews indicate this is labor-intensive manual work. 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.