Robotic Cheese Making: From Cave Hands to ABB Arms

Robotic cheese making sounds odd for a food that depends on cellars, cultures and people who know when a rind is right. Still, a Vermont cheesemaker says most of the European cheese people eat is matured by robots that turn and brush the wheels. This post follows the work from hand-turned wheels in caves and cellars to the first curd machines and the cheese care robots in modern aging warehouses. It then looks at a Wisconsin creamery's new automated vats, at where ABB robots such as the IRB 1200 Hygienic, the IRB 360 FlexPicker and the IRB 660 palletizer fit, and at what is still hard to automate.

Comté wheels aging on wooden shelves in the Marcel Petite cellar at Fort Saint-Antoine, Doubs, France, 2023. Photo: Marie-Lan Taÿ Pamart / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

How cheese caves and cellars turned wheels by hand

Aging cheese has always been heavy, repetitive work. In southern France, Roquefort can only carry that name if it ripens in the natural Combalou caves of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, and on 4 June 1411 King Charles VI gave the people of the village a monopoly on ripening it. In 1925 Roquefort became the first French cheese with an Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée. In Emilia-Romagna, Parmigiano Reggiano is written about as early as 1254. Its wheels weigh about 38 kilograms, sit on wooden shelves that can be 24 wheels high, and must be cleaned and turned every seven days for at least twelve months.

Two inspectors check a wheel of Gruyère by hand in a ripening cellar, 2007. Photo: Walo von Mühlenen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0 de)

For centuries all of that was done by hand, along with the cutting, stirring and pressing of curd in the dairy. Machines arrived first on the making side. In the nineteenth century the Somerset dairyman Joseph Harding, often called the father of cheddar, introduced a revolving curd breaker that cut down the hand labour of cheddar making. Factory dairies with large vats and presses followed, yet cellar work stayed manual for a long time. Someone still had to lift each wheel, flip it, brush or wipe the rind and slide it back, thousands of times a week, while inspectors tapped wheels with small hammers to listen for flaws.

Workers turn slabs of cheddar curd by hand before milling at the Tavistock Cheese Company, Ontario, 1984. Photo: Archives of Ontario via Wikimedia Commons (OGL Ontario)

Cheese care robots took over that lifting. They are rail or floor machines that drive along the racks, pull a board or a wheel out, turn it, brush or smear the rind and put it back. The Swiss firm LEU Anlagenbau sells a curing robot built for Gruyère, Comté and Beaufort that handles 90 to 140 loaves an hour. At the Beaufortin dairy cooperative in Beaufort-sur-Doron, a robot named Robofort turns the wheels in the cellar automatically. The Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium says its makers have used affinage robots for more than 40 years, and that for larger producers the cleaning is fully mechanized.

A ripening cellar of the Beaufortin dairy cooperative in Beaufort-sur-Doron; the Robofort robot that turns the wheels stands at the far end. Photo: Pemberlaid / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Cheese plants and aging warehouses in 2026

Automation is still spreading on the making side. In September 2026 the Westby Cooperative Creamery in Wisconsin, the oldest dairy cooperative in the state and its last cottage cheese maker, cut the ribbon on a modernization worth nearly 15 million dollars. It installed enclosed vats from the Danish company Nordic Dairy Technology that mix and cut the curd automatically, the first commercial system of its kind in the United States. Before, workers cut the curd with a 70 pound knife. Vat cycles drop from 16 hours to eight, yield from the same milk rises by 10 to 15 percent, and the plant gains seven million pounds of yearly capacity. The CEO says nobody is being laid off; staff are retraining for maintenance and warehouse work.

A creamery owner in Easton, Maryland, checks the set of the curd in an open vat by hand, 2013. Photo: Bob Nichols / USDA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Aging rooms already run on robots. Mateo Kehler of Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont told The Cheese Professor that the farm handles 20,000 to 25,000 wheels every week with a Swiss-made robot that picks them off the shelf, turns them, brushes them and sprays brine or wine on some. He said rind quality became more consistent once the brushing pressure stopped depending on the person doing it. Emmi Roth in Wisconsin uses a robot to move cheese into cellars with racks up to 24 feet high, plus smear robots that apply culture to the rinds. In Italy, the EU-funded PARMESCAN project is building a robot arm with CT imaging to handle, clean and inspect Parmigiano wheels.

Parmigiano Reggiano wheels aging on high shelves in a warehouse in Emilia-Romagna, 2011. Photo: Udo Schröter / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

ABB does not make cheese turning robots, and none of the cellars above uses ABB arms. Its robots work on the steps around them. The IRB 1200 Hygienic is a small six-axis arm with an IP67 body, an IP69K stainless tool flange and food-grade H1 oil, made for washdown work with meat, fish, fruit and vegetables. The IRB 360 FlexPicker is a delta robot that uses vision to pick and pack food from a moving belt, and its stainless version can be washed with hot water and detergent. At the end of the line, palletizers such as the IRB 660 stack the cases. Belt picking like this relies on conveyor tracking.

An ABB IRB 1200 Hygienic robot picking bananas in a food handling demo. Photo: ABB

Where robotic cheese making goes next

The next jobs to automate sit between the vat and the cellar: moving young wheels into brine, out of brine and onto boards, then carrying full racks into storage. A mid-size arm such as an ABB IRB 6700 can lift loads in that range, and an AMR such as the Flexley Mover could carry racks between rooms. ABB has not announced a cheese plant project like this, so treat it as a possibility. The appeal is the one Westby and Jasper Hill describe, fewer injuries from lifting wet, heavy wheels. Cells like this are usually laid out and tested first in RobotStudio.

ABB palletizing robots on the UHT milk lines at Piracanjuba's plant in Goiás, Brazil. Photo: ABB (ABB Robotics magazine 1/14)

At home and in small farm dairies, robotic cheese making will look different. Small makers cannot pay for a cellar robot built for 100,000 wheels, and the farmstead cheese movement grew partly on hand work. A smaller cobot such as ABB's GoFa CRB 15000, which limits its force so it can work next to people, could in principle flip and brush a few hundred wheels on a farm. It would need hygienic covers and a gripper that does not mark soft rinds, and nobody sells that package today. Farms that already use milking robots, covered in our post on dairy automation, are the most likely to try it.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

Hygiene comes first among the open problems. Every surface that touches a rind must be cleaned without washing away the cultures that make the cheese. A machine can turn a wheel every seven days without tiring, but Kehler wants his staff on the work only people can do, reading what is happening on a rind and deciding what to do about it. Tapping a Parmigiano wheel for hidden flaws is still a trained inspector's job. Protected designations also limit what may change; the Parmigiano rules still require traditional steps. And robots cost money that small creameries rarely have. Westby needed a USDA loan guarantee of 14.1 million dollars to pay for its vats.

A cellar worker moves a stack of Comté wheels with a pallet truck at Fort Saint-Antoine, 2023. Photo: Marie-Lan Taÿ Pamart / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

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