Improving Productivity: A Review of Robotic Applications in Food Industry

The role of robots is becoming substantial for industrial applications and business competitiveness. The purpose of this paper is to review robotic transformation concept and to investigate its business applications in the food industry. The robot transformation in food industry provided a robust support in raising business productivity, reduced cost and enhanced customer's loyalty, besides the food safety and quality. Its service in production systems for material handling and packaging operations is inevitable. Despite the importance of robotics in improving productivity, small scale food companies are often reluctant to invest in robotization of their operations. Since it involves high initial investment, maintenance and costs associated with training skilled employees for programming of robotics. Mainly, two points have raised concerns in the discussion of this paper. First, the robot technology has been enhanced to deliver services for the large scale food companies. Meanwhile, the experiences gained in the food service sector which implement robots can replace the human touch. At the end of this review, several solutions are recommended to shed light on the applications of the robot in the food industry.