Sandwich Making Robot: ABB Arms on the Deli Line

A sandwich making robot sounds like a small job until you watch a lunch rush. Every order is a different stack of bread, spread, meat, cheese and salad, built in seconds and wrapped without a mess. This post follows the sandwich from an eighteenth century card table to the deli counter and the factory, then to the robot stations being tried today. It also looks at where ABB robots such as the IRB 360 FlexPicker, the YuMi and the IRB 1200 Hygienic could fit, and says plainly where that fit is only a possibility.

Staff assemble sandwiches along a row of ingredient bins at a Jimmy John's shop. Photo: Jimmy John's Franchise, LLC via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How the sandwich became a production line

The name comes from John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, though the food is much older than he is. The earliest written use of the word is usually credited to Edward Gibbon, whose journal for November 1762 mentions "a bit of cold meat, or a Sandwich". The story that the earl invented it at a gaming table comes from the French writer Pierre-Jean Grosley, who visited London in 1765, and historians doubt it. Either way the idea was simple: a meal that needs no plate and leaves one hand free.

John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, painted by Thomas Gainsborough in 1783. Photo: Thomas Gainsborough via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The sandwich became a mass product once bread arrived pre-cut. Otto Rohwedder's machine, which sliced and wrapped loaves, was installed at the Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri, and the first sliced loaves went on sale on 7 July 1928. National sales jumped from 1930, when Wonder Bread began promoting sliced bread. Supermarket slicers still do the same job today. Even slices matter to a robot later on, because a gripper can only stack what it can predict, and a loaf cut to one thickness removes the hardest cutting step from the cell.

Pre-sliced bread comes out of a supermarket slicer in Norway, 2017. Photo: Wolfmann / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sandwich shops then turned the job into a line. A worker at a deli or sub counter walks along a row of bins, adds each ingredient in the same order and passes the result to the wrapper. An automation engineer would draw exactly that sequence on a flow chart, with one station per ingredient and a fixed order of steps. I could not find a documented early robot sandwich line, so I will not invent one. The first prototypes I can source are student projects: a 2018 kiosk at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a 2025 kiosk called SNAAK at Carnegie Mellon.

A deli counter at Dong Phuong in New Orleans, where each sandwich is built along a row of fillings. Photo: Infrogmation of New Orleans / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

A sandwich robot needs eyes before it needs speed

The most serious recent attempt comes from industry. Bizerba, FANUC, Schmalz, ViscoTec and KILIVATIONS showed a robotic sandwich station at automatica in Munich in 2025. Bizerba supplies the slicing, a FANUC cobot does the handling, Schmalz provides vacuum grippers and ViscoTec doses the sauces. French retail press said a station of this kind was among the most discussed exhibits at EuroShop in Düsseldorf in February 2026. I found no confirmed store deployment yet, so treat it as an advanced prototype, not a counter you can visit.

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

ABB's news this month touches the missing piece, which is vision. In mid-October 2026 ABB announced an expansion of OmniCore EyeMotion with AI Robot Trainer, shown at CIIF in Shanghai. ABB says it helps integrators cope with changing products, lighting, layouts and object variations, works with any brand of camera, and cuts commissioning time by up to 90 percent. Those are ABB's own figures. A sandwich line has exactly these problems, because no two lettuce leaves or tomato slices land the same way twice.

An ABB demonstration of AI vision tools: a presenter holds a tablet beside a cobot arm. Photo: ABB

ABB has not announced a sandwich project, so what follows is a possibility, not a customer story. The IRB 360 FlexPicker is a fast delta robot, and ABB images show it placing burger toppings at BurgerBots. ABB's YuMi finishes burgers at the same restaurant in Los Gatos, California. The IRB 1200 Hygienic is a hygienic version of the compact IRB 1200, which ABB shows picking fruit in a food demo. A cell could pair a FlexPicker for slices with a cobot for assembly, tested first in RobotStudio.

An ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker stacking burger toppings at BurgerBots. Photo: ABB

From the office canteen to the kitchen at home

I found no sandwich robot built for a home kitchen, and the numbers show why. A household makes a few sandwiches a day, while a hospital kitchen or a petrol station needs hundreds. Bizerba names large kitchens, hospitals, petrol stations and food retail as its first targets, with hotel lobbies in later concepts. Homes would follow only if arms, grippers and cleaning get cheap enough to justify a countertop machine, and if that machine can be rinsed as easily as a blender jar.

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

Factories face a different set of problems. A plant that packs sandwiches for shops must change recipes often, keep bread, meat and sauce apart, and wash down thoroughly. Allergen control is a real constraint, so a robot that touches many ingredients needs cleanable surfaces and a clear cleaning routine. These are the hygiene issues that already shape ABB food cells, and they decide whether a design is allowed on the line at all. Safety around staff is the other gate, since packing lines often keep people beside the robot. Fast food kitchens deal with the same questions.

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

Cost and skills matter next. Someone has to teach the cell new fillings, set the portion for each one, adjust grips for a new bread and keep the camera models current. That is the work EyeMotion and AI Robot Trainer aim to make easier for integrators, and it is why no-code robot control matters for small food businesses. For the next few years, and without any promise from ABB, expect sandwich robots in places that sell many sandwiches to many people, with homes some way behind.

A Subway shop in Bristow, Oklahoma, 2026, the kind of high-volume sandwich outlet a robot station would serve. Photo: G. Edward Johnson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com