Field Kitchen Robot: From Gulaschkanone to ABB Arms

A field kitchen robot sounds like a gimmick until you count how many people an army has to feed, in places where a normal kitchen does not exist. On October 21, 2026, The Times reported that the German army is the first to employ a robot to cook for troops. This post traces military cooking from horse-drawn wagons and the Gulaschkanone to today's container kitchens, looks at what is actually being tested, and asks where ABB's robot arms could fit, and where nobody has said they do.

A French army field kitchen on two wheels, now in a museum. Photo: Stolbovsky / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

From wagons and goulash cannons to truck kitchens

Armies carried their kitchens long before they had engines. According to Wikipedia, militaries first used field kitchens built into four-wheeled wagons, such as chuckwagons, and the design was still in use in the 19th century. A field bakery used by Napoleon's Grande Armée, captured at Waterloo, is on display at the Royal Logistic Corps Museum. Napoleon also offered a 12,000 franc prize in 1795 for better food preservation, and Nicolas Appert won it in 1810 with a method of sealing food in corked glass jars. In the American Civil War, a standard Union ration was roughly three-quarters of a pound of meat and a pound of flour or cornmeal, often issued as hardtack and salted meat that would keep.

A chuckwagon camp kitchen on the Texas plains, 1900, the kind of wagon kitchen used before motors. Photo: William Henry Jackson / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In 1892 Karl Rudolf Fissler of Idar-Oberstein invented a mobile field kitchen that Germans nicknamed the Gulaschkanone, or goulash cannon, because the stove's chimney looked like a gun barrel when the unit was taken apart for towing. Two-wheeled trailer kitchens became common in the 20th century. The idea was simple: cook a big pot of hot food close to the front instead of hauling cold rations from far behind it.

A Gulaschkanone field kitchen trailer, here used by a fire brigade in Dresden. Photo: Stefan Kuhn / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Vehicle kitchens followed. Wikipedia shows an early truck-mounted kitchen built for the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, and notes that the United Kingdom ran mobile canteens in World War II to lift morale. Larger "flying kitchens" can now serve whole battalions. Even so, a US National Research Council study cited by the magazine deutschland.de found that meals from conventional field catering can be served six to seven hours after they were cooked.

Women cooks at a large field cooking range at the front in World War I. Photo: National Library of Scotland via Wikimedia Commons (no restrictions)

A robot cook arrives at the barracks

That gap is what the German trials try to close. Since April, the Bundeswehr has been testing an autonomous cooking robot at the Hugo-Junkers barracks in Alt-Duvenstedt, Schleswig-Holstein. About 900 soldiers can order meals from it outside the opening hours of the mess hall. Soldiers order when they like, instead of waiting for fixed serving times. The system comes from Munich-based Circus Group, which calls it the CA-1. According to the company, it works fully autonomously in about seven square meters, from handing out ingredients to serving the meal.

A Bundeswehr MAN truck fitted with a field kitchen kit, 2011. Photo: Manolo Gomez / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The army describes the robot as an extra option for small sites or missions abroad, not a replacement for the mess hall, and the pilot runs until December 31 before a decision on buying more. A captain from the Bundeswehr's catering office says the troops have reacted positively, and that the alternative to schnitzel and steak goes down well. The restaurant association DEHOGA told dpa that a robot cannot replace trained cooks, because cooking remains a craft. Circus also makes the CA-M, an insulated container version it claims can hold up to 40 meals ready to serve at once.

A Norwegian army field kitchen on a 1905 postcard, with soldiers cooking outdoors. Photo: Unknown author / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Germany is not alone. Circus says it has an agreement with the Ukrainian armed forces and a tender win in Lithuania. Goodbytz, a Hamburg company, has had a container kitchen at Camp Walker, a US base in South Korea, since spring 2026. The system is a 20-foot container that runs on a generator and has built-in refrigeration, and the company says it serves 30 fresh dishes within minutes. The US military has also ordered 20 more cooking robots from Germany. All of this comes from company statements and news coverage, and we found no independent evaluation of how well the machines cook. ABB is not part of any of these projects, as far as we can find.

A Karcher tactical field kitchen used by the Cayman Islands Regiment, 2021. Photo: Scottish Caymanian / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Where ABB robots could fit

ABB does not make a military kitchen, but its robots already cook for civilians. The Roboeatz ARK autonomous kitchen uses an ABB IRB 4600, and the IRB 1200 Hygienic is built for food handling and washdown. A field version would need the same two things a civilian one does: an arm that repeats tasks precisely, and safe behavior around people. ABB's SafeMove software, which monitors speed and position, is the kind of tool that makes a robot safe to run beside a soldier. This is a possibility, not an announced project.

An ABB IRB 4600 robot inside the Roboeatz ARK autonomous kitchen. Photo: ABB

The hard part is the environment. A tent or container sees heat, cold, dust, vibration and a generator that may trip. The CA-M's container is insulated so that it can hold stable temperatures, but a robot arm inside still has to cope with every bump on the road. Armed forces also care about ration shelf life, fuel, and how many people it takes to keep a kitchen running. A robot cell is usually planned and tested virtually first, and programs like this are built in RobotStudio before any hardware moves. We have covered similar work in robot cooks for school kitchens and soup cooking robots.

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

The open problems are cost, reliability and trust. A robot that fails in a barracks is an inconvenience; one that fails in the field leaves a unit without a meal, so many armies will want a human cook as a backup. A human cook can improvise with whatever arrives on the supply truck, which is hard to program. The skills also change: someone still has to stock the ingredients, clean, repair and decide the menu. My guess is that robots start in rear areas and small sites, as in Alt-Duvenstedt, before they cook anywhere near a front line.

The Roboeatz ARK's gripper holding a freshly cooked bowl of pasta. Photo: ABB

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