Kimchi Robot: From Kimjang Tables to ABB Arms

A kimchi robot is a machine that salts, seasons, weighs or packs kimchi without human hands doing every step. The term covers a lot, from cabbage-salting lines to grippers that lift seasoned leaves into a tray. This post follows kimchi from the winter kimjang gathering to factory lines and the packaging research under way in Korea, then asks where ABB robots such as the IRB 360 FlexPicker and the hygienic IRB 1200 could fit. We found no ABB kimchi installation, so those parts are possibilities.

Cabbages, radish, salt and red chili paste laid out for kimjang at a Seoul event. Photo: Caroline Knox / Flickr via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

From backyard jars to the kimjang table

Kimjang is the late-autumn gathering when families and neighbors make a winter's supply of kimchi together. UNESCO added it to its intangible heritage list in 2013 under the title "Kimjang: Making and Sharing Kimchi." The kimchi was stored in large earthenware jars, and many households buried them in the yard to keep the contents cool. When Daewoo released a kimchi refrigerator in 1984 it failed in the market, partly because so many families still buried their kimchi.

Earthenware jars for storing kimchi and other fermented foods at a Korean hanok. Photo: Drab Makyo / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Making it by hand is a sequence of wet, heavy steps. Cabbages are cut and salted, with salt worked between the leaves, then left to draw out water. After rinsing and draining, a red seasoning paste is rubbed into every layer by gloved hands, and the leaves are folded into jars or boxes. Each step depends on touch. The cook judges how limp the leaves have gone and how much paste each layer takes, which is why the job resisted machines for so long.

Salted napa cabbage, drained and ready for seasoning. Photo: Joseph Steinberg / Flickr via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The kitchen changed first. Mando launched the Dimchae kimchi refrigerator in 1995, aimed at apartment households, and the Korea Times reported 5,000 sold in its first year and 530,000 by 1999. Factories followed. A 2018 conference paper argued that rising labor costs and imports of Chinese kimchi make automation a way to stay price competitive. One Korean study of mechanizing the salting step says most plants sprinkle salt between the cabbage leaves, and that the conditions must be standardized before a machine can take over. That step is still being researched.

A kimchi refrigerator drawer fitted below a kitchen hob. Photo: Jose Gabriel Marcelino / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Kimchi factories and the picking problem

Today kimchi is also an export business. Daesang's Jongga brand said on 29 September 2026 that it is stepping up US production and distribution. Its plant in City of Industry, California, finished in early 2022, can make 2,000 tons a year, and in 2023 the company bought Oregon's Lucky Foods, maker of Seoul Kimchi. By the company's own figures, Jongga accounted for about 48 million dollars, or 56 percent, of Korea's roughly 86 million dollars in kimchi exports in the first half of 2026. The United States has been its largest export market since 2023, when it passed Japan.

Packaged kimchi on a shop shelf, the product that factory lines fill. Photo: Piotrus / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Packing is where robots get stuck. In 2023 the Korea Food Research Institute studied two kimchi facilities, named weighing, packaging and loading as candidates for automation, and simulated a multi-joint robot for weighing and packaging. It estimated that such a robot could replace about 30 percent of the workers in one process. Also in 2023 the Korea Electronics Technology Institute reported a gripper for halved cabbage kimchi, because seasoned leaves are irregular and tear easily. It uses deep learning to find the kimchi and its edges, has flexible fingertips and is easy to clean. It was still in a test bed.

Gloved hands spreading red seasoning between cabbage leaves, the soft and tearing product a gripper must handle. Photo: USAG-Humphreys / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Where does ABB fit? No source we found names an ABB robot in a kimchi plant. The pieces exist, though. The IRB 360 FlexPicker is a delta robot for fast picking, and its stainless version is validated to IP69K for washdown with hot water and detergent, which a salty, wet product demands. The IRB 1200 Hygienic is a compact arm for food handling, and IRB 660 palletizers stack finished cases. Similar lines appear in our posts on dumpling making and packaging lines. Gripping cabbage coated in chili paste is the part nobody has settled.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker delta robots picking items on a moving line. Photo: ABB

What comes after the first robot-packed tray

Hygiene is the big constraint. Kimchi is salty, keeps fermenting in the pack and stains everything red, so every surface must survive a hard wash. That rules out many standard grippers, and ABB sells the IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection, built to handle water and dust. A vision-guided pick also has to find a limp leaf in a tray where the light changes with every smear of paste. A team would likely build a digital model of the tray and conveyor in RobotStudio and test the cell there before ordering hardware, then tune the grip on real product.

An ABB IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection, built to handle water and dust. Photo: ABB

Kimjang itself will probably stay in human hands. The 2014 Seoul Kimchi Making and Sharing Festival put thousands of volunteers at long tables in Seoul Plaza, and the sharing is the point of the event. The likelier path is a split. Machines take over salting, rinsing, weighing and boxing in factories, while seasoning by hand stays for small batches and home kitchens. No countertop kimchi robot for families has been announced that we could find, so that side remains open, and weighing and boxing are the stations the 2023 study flagged first.

Thousands of volunteers make kimchi at long tables at the Seoul Kimchi Making and Sharing Festival, 2014. Photo: Republic of Korea / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Skills and cost are the other open questions. The 2023 study counted workers a robot could replace, so plants will want payback figures from lines that handle real kimchi rather than boxes. Operators will need training to clean the cell, clear jams and retune the vision system when a recipe changes from napa cabbage to radish. Watch for the first named kimchi line that uses a vision-guided delta or arm cell, since that would show whether the gripper problem has been solved.

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

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