Dumpling Making Robot: Hand Pleats to ABB Lines

Anyone who has folded a few hundred jiaozi for a family dinner knows why a dumpling making robot sounds attractive. The folding is slow, and keeping every dumpling the same size and shape takes practice. This post looks at how dumplings were made by hand for centuries, how machines took over the frozen food factories, and where restaurants still make them by hand. It then looks at what ABB robots such as the IRB 360 FlexPicker, the IRB 1200 Hygienic and YuMi could do around a dumpling line, and why the pleat itself is still a hard problem.

Cooks folding dumplings by hand at Din Tai Fung in Taiwan. Photo: Wolfiewolf / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Hand-folded dumplings from Turpan to Taipei

Chinese tradition credits the physician Zhang Zhongjing, in the Eastern Han period, with inventing jiaozi to treat frostbitten ears. Centuries later, in the Northern Qi dynasty, the writer Yan Zhitui described the jiaozi, "shaped like a crescent moon", as a common food. Archaeologists have found real dumplings in Tang dynasty tombs at Turpan in Xinjiang, and ceramic models of dumplings and pastries from a Turpan tomb are on show at the National Museum of China. All of these were shaped by hand, long before any machine could do it.

Ceramic dumplings and pastries from a Tang dynasty tomb at Turpan, now in the National Museum of China. Photo: BabelStone / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

For most of that history, dumpling making was family work. A household would roll the wrappers, spoon in the filling and pinch the edges, often around a table before a festival. Jiaozi reached Japan with the millions of Japanese who returned from China after the Second World War, and there they became gyoza. Today most Japanese restaurants buy machine-made wrappers, which are thinner than many handmade ones, so in Japan at least part of the job has long been done by machines.

A home cook finishes the folds on a jiaozi by hand. Photo: Quadell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Din Tai Fung shows how far hand folding can go. It started in Taipei in 1958 as a cooking oil shop run by Yang Bing-yi and his wife Lai Penmei. When the oil trade faded around 1970 they began selling xiaolongbao, and in 1972 the shop became a full restaurant, now known for thin-skinned soup dumplings with 18 folds. Its first branch abroad opened in Tokyo in 1996, and the first ones in mainland China followed in 2000. Inventors were already working on the machine route. In 1977 Te-Hsiu Huang filed a US patent for an automatic dumpling making machine, with forming devices mounted on two rotating wheels.

The open kitchen of a Din Tai Fung restaurant in Singapore, 2007. Photo: Richard Moross / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Dumpling machines and robots today

Most frozen dumplings are now made by machines. When the Associated Press visited CJ CheilJedang's factory in Incheon in 2018, machines cut the dough into circles, dropped in the filling, closed each dumpling into a crescent and pressed a frill pattern on top. The few workers in sight were picking bad vegetables off a conveyor. CJ built its own mandu machine instead of using Japanese gyoza machines. In August 2026 a report from its Beaumont plant in California put output at about 350,000 pounds a day, which the paper converted to roughly 860,000 dumplings, and gave CJ a 41 percent share of the US retail dumpling market.

A frozen gyoza vending machine at Higashi Okazaki Station in Japan. Photo: HQA02330 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Food makers are still building. In September Chosunbiz reported that Japanese and Korean companies are racing to build food plants in the United States, and CJ's new site in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is due in 2027. Restaurants use machines as well. Beijing8, a dumpling chain started in Stockholm in 2011, makes its dumplings with what its founder Mikael Ljunggren calls a robot. "My chef would make around 200 per hour," he said. "With our robot, we can now make around 6,000 per hour."

Folded jiaozi lined up on a paper-covered tray, ready for the fridge or freezer. Photo: Quadell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ABB has not announced a dumpling project, but its food robots already do the jobs that surround a folding machine. In Sweden, the pastry maker Delicato uses four IRB 360 FlexPicker robots at its Segeltorp bakery, south of Stockholm, to pick chocolate balls off a conveyor and place them in blisters, and a FlexPicker could put frozen dumplings into trays in the same way. The IRB 1200 Hygienic has an IP67 body, an IP69K stainless tool flange and food-grade H1 oil. On a line that is washed down every day it could load steamer baskets, though no dumpling maker has said it uses one.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots picking chocolate balls at Delicato in Sweden. Photo: ABB

What a dumpling making robot still has to learn

The pleat is the hard part. A die can press a crescent gyoza, but an 18-fold xiaolongbao needs fingers that pinch and turn thin dough without tearing it, which is much closer to a cook's work than to a press. ABB arms can already work in a public kitchen: at BurgerBots in Los Gatos a dual-arm YuMi assembles burgers alongside a FlexPicker. Folding soup dumplings would need new grippers, vision and a lot of testing, and nobody has shown a robot doing it yet.

An ABB YuMi cobot finishing a burger at BurgerBots in Los Gatos, California. Photo: ABB

Factories will probably move first, since the shapes they make are already simple enough for machines. The likely gains are in packing, tray loading and palletising, where a FlexPicker or a wash-down arm can run a whole shift. Cells like these are usually laid out in RobotStudio and synchronised with the belt through conveyor tracking, so the robot can pick from a moving line. Cleaning stays difficult because dough and raw meat filling stick to every surface. Our post on the noodle making robot covers a related food line.

A wash-down FlexPicker being sprayed clean, as food lines require. Photo: ABB

Homes and small restaurants will take longer. A countertop machine that folds dumplings would have to cope with different doughs and fillings, come apart for cleaning, and cost little enough to compete with a bag of frozen gyoza. Handmade dumplings still sell, too: in September chef Chuxin Liu opened L's Dumplings, where every dumpling is made by hand. For now, robots are most likely to end up packing the dumplings while people keep doing the pleats.

Xiaolongbao soup dumplings in a steamer basket in Shanghai. Photo: Robigasp / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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