Meal Kit Robot: From TV Dinner Trays to ABB Picking Cells

A meal kit box holds a dozen small things that all have to be right: a portion of meat, a bag of rice, two onions, a sachet of sauce and a recipe card, packed cold for one customer. Ready meals have the same problem in a tray. This post looks at how that work went from hand-filled airline and TV dinner trays to the conveyor lines of meal kit companies, and where a meal kit robot fits today. It covers a Dutch fresh food plant that uses ABB robots for order picking, the ABB arms suited to ingredient picking, and what still keeps people on the line.

Ingredients unpacked from a Blue Apron meal kit box, 2019. Photo: Yongho Kim / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Airline trays, TV dinners and the first meal boxes

Assembled meals started in commercial kitchens. Airline flight kitchens, like the one SAS ran at Copenhagen's Kastrup airport in the 1950s and 1960s, employed rows of cooks who portioned food onto trays by hand, one tray per passenger. That tray shaped the first famous ready meal. In 1953 C. A. Swanson & Sons launched its TV Dinner, a Thanksgiving meal of turkey, cornbread stuffing, peas and sweet potatoes packed in an aluminium tray like those used for airline food service. It was heated in the oven and eaten straight from the tray.

Cooks preparing food by hand in the SAS flight kitchen at Copenhagen's Kastrup airport, 1950s or 1960s. Photo: SAS Scandinavian Airlines via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Frozen dinners turned meal assembly into factory work. Each compartment of a tray had to be filled with the right component in the right amount, thousands of times a shift. The tray itself changed over time: in 1986 the Campbell Soup Company introduced a microwave safe tray, and most frozen meal trays today are plastic or coated cardboard. The job of putting several different foods into one container stayed largely manual for decades, because food is soft, sticky and irregular.

A frozen TV dinner in a compartment tray before heating. Photo: Sir Beluga / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Meal kits arrived much later. The model began in Denmark, where Mad til Døren launched in 2003, and spread to Sweden with Middagsfrid in 2007 and Linas Matkasse in 2008. Blue Apron, HelloFresh and Plated reached the US market in 2012. A kit is harder to automate than a tray meal in one way: instead of one recipe made thousands of times, a plant packs many recipes in many combinations, each going to a named customer on a fixed delivery day.

A Blue Apron meal kit box delivered to a kitchen, 2017. Photo: Timtempleton / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Order picking robots and the meal kit business today

The business is still changing. In early September 2026 Wonder, the food hall and delivery company founded by Marc Lore, cut about 150 jobs, roughly 7 percent of its staff, and told the New York Post the savings would go into new locations and into robotics and automation. Wonder has owned Blue Apron since November 2023 and still sells meal kits under that brand. Nation's Restaurant News reported that a recent $650 million funding round valued Wonder at $9.65 billion and that the company has named AI and robotics as areas for automating much of its store work. Its restaurants already use robotic makelines that slice vegetables and assemble rice bowls.

A HelloFresh delivery van unloading in Miami, 2023. Photo: Phillip Pessar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

ABB robots are already moving ready-to-cook meal boxes in the Netherlands. Heemskerk Fresh & Easy, which Wim Heemskerk started in the 1960s with chopped vegetable soup mixes, now makes more than 400 products, including salads, pre-cut vegetables and ready-to-cook meal boxes, and ships 3.5 to 4 million items a week. Its salads and meals keep only three or four days, so time in the supply chain matters. Manual order picking could no longer keep up, and skilled staff were hard to find.

An ABB IRB 6700 on a track picking crates of fresh food at Heemskerk's facility in the Netherlands. Photo: ABB

ABB built Heemskerk an order picking line around its robots. An IRB 660 four-axis robot takes crates for each supermarket order and puts them on a conveyor. Six IRB 6700 robots on a track then pick crates into pigeon holes assigned to each store, two more IRB 6700s build stable mixed stacks, and a second IRB 660 loads the stacks onto dollies. According to ABB and the IFR, delivering store-ready orders this way adds about a day of shelf life, which matters for products that last only a few days.

The order picking hall at Heemskerk Fresh & Easy, with ABB robots stacking crates. Photo: ABB

Where meal kit and ready meal robots go next

The next step is picking the ingredients themselves, which is harder than moving crates. ABB's IRB 360 FlexPicker, guided by PickMaster vision, already picks loose food items from moving conveyors at high speed, and the same setup could place sealed sachets and portions into kit boxes or trays. Engineers usually set up the tracking of a moving belt in RobotStudio, as in our module on conveyor tracking, before the cell is built. Wrapped items are the easy case, because a vacuum cup can pick a sealed sachet the same way every time. Raw meat, herbs and sauces change shape and need grippers that cope with that, along with cameras that can tell a bunch of coriander from a bag of spinach.

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

Hygiene and variety set the limits. Ready meal lines are washed down often, so robots near open food need hygienic designs such as the wash-down FlexPicker or the IRB 1200 Hygienic. Meal kit menus change every week, which means new items and new box layouts, and every change costs programming time. Odd jobs such as wrapping a sandwich or adding a garnish still go to people, who handle a new item without any reprogramming.

Wrapping sandwiches by hand in a US Air Force flight kitchen. Photo: U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Demand is the other open problem. Meal kit companies have struggled to keep subscribers: a 2017 Morning Consult survey found that only 6 percent of customers were still subscribed to most services after three months. A robot cell pays off when a line runs steadily, so uneven demand makes the business case harder. For households, robot-packed kits would mainly mean fresher boxes and fewer picking mistakes, and our post on home cooking with AI meal plans looks at what happens once the box reaches the kitchen.

An ABB FlexPicker cell set up with PickMaster Lite. Photo: ABB

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