French Fries Robot: ABB Robots From Peeler to Pallet

How a french fries robot packs potato products, from hand peeling and Simplot's frozen fries for McDonald's to ABB FlexPicker packing and IRB 660 pallets.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/7/20265 min read

A bag of frozen fries passes through washers, peelers, cutters, blanchers, fryers and freezers before anyone sees it, and the last part of that trip is where a french fries robot usually works. Robots in potato plants rarely touch a raw potato. They pick finished bags and cartons, pack them into cases and stack the cases on pallets. This post follows potato processing from hand peeling in army camps and small chip shops to the frozen fry plants of Idaho, Oregon and New Brunswick, then looks at today's packing lines, the ABB robots that fit them and the new plants now being built.

Stainless steel conveyors carrying masses of raw cut potato strips through a processing line

Cut potato strips moving along a french fry production line. Photo: SortingExpert / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Peeling knives, chip shops and the first frozen fry plants

For most of the 20th century, a potato was peeled by a person with a knife. Army cooks, restaurant kitchens and the first chip makers all started the same way, with sacks of potatoes, buckets of water and hours of work. Restaurants that served french fries usually cut them on site. McDonald's did this at each location until the late 1960s, and its preferred russet potatoes were hard to get for about three months every summer, which made quality uneven from one season to the next.

Black and white photo of two cooks seated with baskets of potatoes beside army tents

Cooks peeling potatoes by hand outside a US Army cook tent, early 20th century. Photo: National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Freezing changed the business. In 1949 the brothers Nephi and Golden Grigg and their brother-in-law Otis Williams turned a rented frozen food plant in Ontario, Oregon, into a potato plant, and their company became Ore-Ida. In 1953 they made Tater Tots from the slivers left over after cutting fries. Gilbert Lamb founded Lamb Weston in a former co-op plant in Weston, Oregon, in 1950, and Harrison and Wallace McCain started McCain Foods in Florenceville, New Brunswick, in 1957. McCain built a fry plant in Scarborough, England, in 1968.

Black and white photo of a man handling potatoes at a machine in a chip factory

A worker at the potato line of a chip factory in Brooks, Alberta, 1967. Photo: Provincial Archives of Alberta via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

The deal that made frozen fries normal was a handshake. In 1967 J. R. Simplot and Ray Kroc agreed that Simplot would supply McDonald's with frozen french fries, and by 1972 all of the chain's fries were frozen. Simplot could deliver russet fries all year, and the deal paid for new plants, including one at Hermiston, Oregon, in 1977. Inside such plants, machines took over peeling, cutting and frying, but people still sorted defects, filled bags and stacked boxes by hand for decades. Photos from a chip factory in Brooks, Alberta, in 1967 show exactly that.

Black and white photo of a woman in a cap filling bags and boxes of potato chips at a table

Potato chips bagged and boxed by hand at the Brooks, Alberta factory, 1967. Photo: Provincial Archives of Alberta via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

Fryer lines, FlexPickers and new fry plants

Fry plants are still being built. PotatoPro reported on 28 September 2026 that construction has begun on what will be Ukraine's largest potato processing plant, at the Biosens Industrial Park in the Cherkasy region. The first phase, worth UAH 960 million, will make 25,000 tonnes of potato flour a year from late 2026 or early 2027. A second phase planned for 2027 would add Ukraine's first large frozen french fry line, with a capacity of 60,000 to 150,000 tonnes a year. Lines like that need packing and palletizing at the end.

Large grey factory building with a Lamb Weston sign behind a hedge and a road

Lamb Weston's potato processing plant in Wisbech, England. Photo: Bearas / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Equipment makers are showing what the middle of the line looks like now. In a release that PotatoPro carried on 26 September 2026, Heat and Control said it will bring potato processing, seasoning and packaging equipment to Pack Expo International 2026 in Chicago. For the first time at that show it will display its Tek-Dry french fry dryers, a single pass dryer built for high volume french fry and snack drying, and a water recirculation system meant to cut freshwater use in potato lines. None of these machines is a robot, but their output sets the pace that the packing robots at the end of the line must match.

Guarded robot cells and conveyors carrying green chips bags and cartons in a packing hall

The chips packing line at Orkla Latvija, where five ABB IRB 360 FlexPickers pack bags into cartons. Photo: ABB

ABB's part starts once the product is sealed. At Orkla Latvija, a food company in the Baltic states, ABB replaced a manual chips packing shop with five IRB 360 FlexPicker robots working in parallel. PickMaster machine vision finds each incoming bag, the robots place the bags in cartons, and 35 conveyor belts carry packs to and from the cells at 65 packages a minute. For frozen fries, the same kind of delta robot can case pack bags, and ABB's IRB 460 and IRB 660 palletizers are built to stack heavy cases on pallets at the end of the line.

Several ABB delta robots above a conveyor placing red packs into cardboard cases

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items into cases at high speed. Photo: ABB

Where fry plants and frying robots go next

Frozen fry plants are cold, wet and washed down often, so hygiene decides which robots can go near open product. ABB offers wash-down versions of the FlexPicker and the IRB 1200 Hygienic, a small arm built for food handling and wash-down cleaning. Using these arms on loose fries or crisps before bagging is possible, but most plants still handle loose potato in bulk on belts and vibratory conveyors. Robots are more likely to spread upstream into jobs like changing cutting heads or taking samples for the quality lab.

White ABB palletizing robot stacking brown cartons onto a pallet next to a stack of red boxes

An ABB IRB 660 palletizing robot stacking boxed products at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

Restaurants are the other place where fries meet robots. Miso Robotics' Flippy 2 fry station, tested at a White Castle in Chicago, fills a basket from a fry dispenser, lowers it into the oil and tips the cooked fries onto a tray, and in 2022 White Castle announced plans to roll Flippy out to 100 locations. Our post on fast food kitchen automation covers the rest of that kitchen. At home, a frying robot is still a novelty, and air fryers already deal with most of the hot oil risk without an arm.

Close view of a delta robot's arms being hit by a spray of water

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

Cost and skills are the open problems. A FlexPicker cell with vision, guarding and conveyors costs a lot, and a small chip maker may change bag sizes several times a week. Offline programming helps here: engineers can build and test a pick and place layout with conveyor tracking in RobotStudio before the line stops. Inspection is harder to hand over. Sorting machines already sit on many strip lines, yet people still check product at the belts, much like the chip sorters in Brooks did in 1967.

Black and white photo of a woman picking through potato chips on a sorting chute

Sorting potato chips by hand at the factory in Brooks, Alberta, 1967. Photo: Provincial Archives of Alberta via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

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