School Kitchen Robot: From Hot Lunch Kettles to ABB Arms

From the dining hall you would never spot the school kitchen robot. In three schools in Gangnam, southern Seoul, collaborative arms now deep fry, stir soup and drain hot oil while the cooks plan menus and serve. This post follows school meals from the hand-stirred pots of the early 1900s, through steam kettles and central kitchens, to the cooking arms Seoul and other districts are testing now. It also looks at where ABB robots such as the IRB 1200 Hygienic, GoFa and FlexPicker could fit, and at the cost, safety and staffing questions any school board will ask before buying one.

Cafeteria staff preparing wraps by hand for the National School Lunch Program in Arlington, Virginia, 2011. Photo: U.S. Department of Agriculture / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How school dinners were cooked by hand

Organised school meals are only about a century old. In Britain, the Education (Provision of Meals) Act 1906 let local councils feed hungry children at school. In the United States, relief programmes in the 1930s used surplus farm food and Works Progress Administration workers to put hot lunches in front of pupils, and the National School Lunch Act of 1946 made the programme permanent. All of it was cooked by hand. Vegetables were peeled by the sack, and soup was stirred in big pots and ladled out one bowl at a time.

Students and their teacher in the teaching kitchen of the Indiana School in Toledo, Ohio, around 1909. Photo: unknown photographer via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Photos from the period show how small and hands-on the work was. In December 1941 the government photographer Irving Rusinow recorded the hot lunch at a school in Peñasco, New Mexico, where children paid about one cent a day for a meal made mostly from surplus commodities. One cook in a white cap looked after a room full of children at long tables. Her arms, a stove and a few large pots carried the whole lunch service, every school day, with no machine doing any of the cooking for her.

The hot lunch at the school in Peñasco, New Mexico, December 1941, where children paid about one cent a day. Photo: Irving Rusinow, National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first machines to reach school kitchens were big kettles. Steam-jacketed and tilting kettles let one cook heat hundreds of portions of soup or porridge and pour them out without lifting the pot. A 1953 photo from Oulu, Finland shows the kitchen staff of an elementary school standing beside a row of them. Later decades brought conveyor dishwashers, combination ovens and, in many countries, central kitchens and cook-chill systems, where meals are cooked in bulk, chilled fast and reheated at the school. People still did the stirring, frying and lifting.

School cooks preparing meals for schoolchildren beside large steam kettles in Oulu, Finland, October 1953. Photo: Finnish Heritage Agency via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Cooking arms move into the school kitchen

South Korea has gone furthest with school kitchen robots, and the push came from health. Korean school meals are cooked fresh on site, which means a lot of frying and stir-frying in hot kitchens. In February 2021 the country first recognised lung cancer in a school cook as an occupational disease caused by exposure to cooking fumes. A later Education Ministry screening of 24,065 cafeteria workers found lung problems, such as nodules, in 28.2 percent of them. Hiring has also become hard, and some Seoul schools struggle to fill cook vacancies at all.

A South Korean school lunch on a steel tray: rice, soup, kimchi, stir-fried pork and a cucumber side dish. Photo: 570cjk / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Gangnam District started its programme in August 2023 at Gaeil Elementary, Gaewon Middle and Seoul Robotics High School, together with the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education and a kitchen automation firm, Korea Robotics. Collaborative arms paired with large cooking kettles handle deep frying, soups and stir-fries. On 6 October 2026 the district reported two upgrades: a simpler touch screen in March and automatic hot oil draining in June. Over the past year the robots worked on 439 of 548 lunch days, and 95.9 percent of 563 surveyed students said the food tasted good. Earlier tests showed staff exposure to oil fumes and fine dust fell by 28.6 percent.

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

ABB is not part of the Gangnam project, though its robots already do kitchen work elsewhere. An ABB IRB 4600 works inside the Roboeatz ARK autonomous kitchen, and ABB arms appear in robotic wok cooking setups. In a school kitchen the IRB 1200 Hygienic, designed for food areas that are washed down often, could handle frying baskets. GoFa CRB 15000 could work beside cooks because it senses contact and stops, and an IRB 360 FlexPicker could place portions on trays. No school uses these yet. In Tennessee, Franklin Special School District chose a simpler route in 2026: Firex braising pans with built-in stirring arms in all eight of its kitchens.

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

What school kitchen robots need next

The next few years will probably bring more of the Gangnam model than the fully automated kitchen. Robots take the hot, heavy, repetitive tasks such as frying and draining oil, and cooks keep control of menus, seasoning and serving. Gangnam changed its system after listening to kitchen staff, which is worth copying, because a robot that pauses mid-batch and needs an engineer to restart it soon gets switched off. In factories and central kitchens the same work shows up as lines where delta robots and arms portion and pack meals, as in meal kit assembly.

ABB's GoFa cobot is guided by hand and stops when it senses contact. Photo: ABB

Cost is the first open question. A Firex pan is valued at about 20,000 dollars, and Franklin paid for its pans entirely with grant money. Gangnam has not published what its robots cost, and most school districts have no budget line for robots or for maintaining them. Safety comes next. A cobot like GoFa stops when it touches a person, yet a school kitchen also has hot oil, steam and wet floors, so every cell still needs guarding and a proper risk assessment. Cells like this are usually planned and tested in simulation first, for example in RobotStudio.

A school food service worker in Arlington, Virginia, cutting melon by hand for fruit salads, 2011. Photo: U.S. Department of Agriculture / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Then there are skills. School cooks will need to load recipes, clean the robot properly and recover from stops, and some Korean cafeteria workers have argued that robots are not a fundamental fix for their working conditions. Families may see a spillover too, since a robot that fries at school is a close cousin of the countertop cooking machines now sold for homes. My guess is that the kitchens that last will be the ones where the robot handles the fryer and the ladle and people still decide what children eat.

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

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