De-stack and place floppy sliced deli meat and cheese onto sandwich bases
In sandwich and wrap production, workers peel individual slices of deli meat and cheese off a stack and lay them flat onto bread or tortillas. The slices are thin, limp, slippery, often cold/tacky, and prone to clinging together or to the gripper; getting exactly one slice (not two stuck together) and depositing it flat without folding, tearing or bunching is the core difficulty. This sits mid-line, downstream of slicing and upstream of layering produce and closing the product. It is hard for a robot because the object geometry changes every pick, vision alone cannot tell whether one or two slices were grabbed, and excessive grip force tears the slice while too little drops it. Fresh & Ready runs this manually at high volume across many SKUs; one vending customer alone has historically purchased ~500,000 sandwiches/salads from the company, implying very large slice-handling counts. Automating this hand-contact step is also directly relevant given the plant's Listeria history tied to food-contact handling. 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 sandwich and wrap production, workers peel individual slices of deli meat and cheese off a stack and lay them flat onto bread or tortillas. The slices are thin, limp, slippery, often cold/tacky, and prone to clinging together or to the gripper; getting exactly one slice (not two stuck together) and depositing it flat without folding, tearing or bunching is the core difficulty. This sits mid-line, downstream of slicing and upstream of layering produce and closing the product. It is hard for a robot because the object geometry changes every pick, vision alone cannot tell whether one or two slices were grabbed, and excessive grip force tears the slice while too little drops it. Fresh & Ready runs this manually at high volume across many SKUs; one vending customer alone has historically purchased ~500,000 sandwiches/salads from the company, implying very large slice-handling counts. Automating this hand-contact step is also directly relevant given the plant's Listeria history tied to food-contact handling.
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.