AI-Driven Robotics Help Cafe Spice Leap Over Labor and Line Hurdles
To meet soaring demand and labor challenges, Cafe Spice turned to AI-powered robotics. The result? Higher throughput, reduced giveaway, and smart insights—without sacrificing quality or presentation.
Cafe Spice production line featuring Chef Robotics’ AI-enabled arms depositing rice into dual-compartment trays. Robots work in tandem with line staff, ensuring precise placement and maintaining packaging presentation standards critical to retail-ready meals.
Chef Robotics
Cafe Spice is a producer of Indian and South Asian-inspired ready-to-eat meals both for its own stable of brands, and also as a contract manufacturer and packager. When leadership found themselves struggling to scale production amid tightening labor markets and operational bottlenecks, it turned to an (until recently) novel solution: AI-supported robotic automation. By partnering with Chef Robotics, the New York–based food manufacturer and brand achieved a substantial increase in output, reduced food giveaway, and unlocked operational insights that went well beyond the capabilities of traditional automation systems—all while preserving the high product quality and precise tray presentation their retail customers have come to expect.
“One of our biggest challenges has been staffing,” said Giovanni Gomez, VP of quality at Cafe Spice. “For the past several years, staffing was very difficult due to many different hiring limitations that were occurring in the industry, which made it quite challenging for us to be able to continue scaling and expanding.”
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, labor participation rates in New York remained low, and the state's minimum wage increase to $15 per hour in 2024 placed additional strain on the company’s operating margins. At the same time, demand for Cafe Spice’s meals—spanning twelve entrée SKUs with multiple portion sizes and tray configurations—continued to climb, intensifying the need for a scalable production solution.
Traditional automation technologies had failed to deliver the flexibility and precision required by Cafe Spice’s packaging operations. Manual tray filling processes, relying on operators to shift bowls down a table rather than using conveyors, capped throughput at about twelve trays per minute. The trays themselves, which feature dual compartments to separate rice from curry, required careful, spill-free deposits to meet Cafe Spice’s exacting standards. Minor misplacements or overfills often led to rework or rejection, while underfills triggered giveaway that directly cut into yield.
Faced with these challenges, Cafe Spice implemented a robotic system developed by Chef Robotics. Unlike traditional depositors, Chef’s solution integrated AI-enabled perception with a conveyor-based modular system, enabling precise, adaptable filling across a variety of tray types and ingredients. The robots were designed to be safely deployed alongside human workers, occupying a similar footprint, and were integrated directly onto Cafe Spice’s newly installed conveyor lines.Chef Robotics’ AI-based perception system uses real-time camera vision and bounding boxes to verify tray fill levels and ingredient placement—ensuring accuracy, consistency, and reduced giveaway across high-mix production.Chef Robotics
“The main reason we went with Chef was due to the large amount of different SKUs that we had to process. It gets quite complex when you have to do changeovers, when you're talking about CIP systems, augers, depositors and volumetric filling equipment. So the Chef robots let us quickly replace utensils and get high efficiency on the line,” Gomez says. “The deployment process was quite simple and seamless. From the moment the robots arrived at our facility, the Chef team was on site, unboxing the robots, helping with the installation and guiding us throughout the entire process, until the robots were working on their own.”
According to Virgilio Felix, COO at Cafe Spice, the switch wasn’t just about automation—it was about insight. “The data insight with the Chef Robotics has been transformative. Previously, we took a sample every 30 minutes. Now, we have granular insight into every deposit in every tray, which allows us to make better business decisions and adjustments where warranted,” he says. That level of visibility came from Chef’s embedded sensors and management dashboard, which provided real-time access to every tray deposit from anywhere in the world.
The operational gains were immediate and measurable. Output on each production line increased from 10 to 15 trays per minute to an average of 30 trays per minute, resulting in a two- to threefold boost in throughput. This allowed Cafe Spice to consolidate production lines and expand capacity without expanding physical infrastructure. Labor productivity also saw a significant increase, as the number of workers needed per line dropped from eight to ten down to just three to four. Freed from repetitive tray-filling tasks, those workers were reallocated to other areas of the facility that had previously been understaffed.
Quality and yield also improved. Before deploying Chef robots, food giveaway averaged 9.19% due to overfilling, inconsistent placement, and underweight tray rejection. After implementation, giveaway dropped to just 3.05%—a 67% reduction. The acceptance rate for trays filled by robots reached 91%, compared to 75% for human-filled meals. These consistency improvements were achieved in part through a proprietary utensil designed by Chef to accommodate Café Spice’s viscous curry sauces and suspended meat chunks without spillage. The robots were also capable of adapting quickly to different SKUs and ingredients, with changeovers taking less than ten minutes.
From a business standpoint, Cafe Spice benefitted from Chef’s robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) model, which replaced traditional capital expenditure with a flat monthly fee that included hardware, software updates, field support, and maintenance. This eliminated the need for a large upfront investment and enabled the company to scale at its own pace. Initially, Cafe Spice deployed four robots to partially automate two lines. Within weeks, that number doubled to eight, and the company is now in the process of onboarding another eight robots to fully automate both production lines with a total of sixteen.
For other CPGs navigating the dual pressures of labor shortages and operational complexity, the Cafe Spice case shows how a smart, packaging-specific application of robotics can create measurable value both in the facility and on the balance sheet. PW
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Chef Robotics’ AI-based perception system uses real-time camera vision and bounding boxes to verify tray fill levels and ingredient placement—ensuring accuracy, consistency, and reduced giveaway across high-mix production.Chef Robotics
