De-nest and handle single tortillas from a stack

Reser's produces enormous tortilla volumes (historically reported at roughly five million tortillas a day) under its Don Pancho and Baja Cafe brands, and tortillas are a key input to downstream burrito and wrap assembly. Separating a single thin, limp, and tacky tortilla from a stack and transferring it without tearing, double-picking, or wrinkling is a classic deformable-handling problem: the object has near-zero bending stiffness, variable moisture and tack between sheets, and shifting geometry as it lifts. The task sits upstream of assembly/folding and ahead of packaging, where a mis-pick stalls the line or wastes product. Vision can locate the top sheet but cannot confirm that exactly one was separated or that it lifted cleanly. This is a high-frequency, repetitive manual or mechanically fixtured operation today. 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.