Soup Cooking Robot: From Rumford's Kitchens to ABB Arms

A soup cooking robot has to do something simple that machines find hard: heat a big volume of liquid, stir it without spilling, and serve it safely to someone who is hungry. Soup has been cooked in bulk since people owned a pot, and it has been automated in pieces for more than a century. This post follows soup from the public soup kitchens of the 1790s and Campbell's condensed can of 1897 to today's soup vending machines and school cooking robots. It then asks where ABB arms could fit, and what stands in the way at home and in factories.

A pot of vegetable soup on the stove, the kind of dish that has been cooked in bulk for centuries. Photo: Tiia Monto / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From Rumford's soup houses to the condensed can

Soup kitchens were an early form of large scale cooking. Sir Benjamin Thompson, later Count Rumford, set up what are often called the earliest modern soup kitchens in Bavaria in the 1790s. A Munich engraving from 1793 shows a long hall of people eating at tables while one server carries a dish. By the end of that decade Rumford style kitchens were running across Britain, and about 60,000 people a day were fed in London alone. Britain's Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 later made soup kitchens illegal, and the Soup Kitchen Act of February 1847 allowed them again in Ireland during the Great Famine.

An engraving of the Munich soup house in 1793, with people eating at long tables. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Campbell's turned soup into a product. Joseph Campbell and Abraham Anderson started the company in 1869, and an 1894 engraving shows the Joseph Campbell Preserve Company works in Camden, New Jersey. In 1897 John T. Dorrance, a chemist with degrees from MIT and Gottingen, joined at $7.50 a week and developed a commercial way to condense soup by cutting its water content in half. Dorrance later served as company president from 1914 to 1930. The company adopted its red and white colours in 1898, and the can has changed little since.

An 1894 engraving of the Joseph Campbell Preserve Company works in Camden, New Jersey. Photo: A.H. Markley via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Soup stayed in public life during the Great Depression. Soup kitchens became a defining image of the early 1930s, and in 1931 Al Capone sponsored one in Chicago. By 1933 Roosevelt's New Deal had moved relief toward cash aid and work programs, and the large emergency kitchens gradually declined. Mechanical help came much later and arrived mostly as vending. A US patent on hot soup vending notes that a robotic arm that moves fast tends to spill the soup, so those machines need a different way to carry the bowl.

Men queue for soup at a Depression era soup kitchen, photographed in June 1936. Photo: National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

What soup robots are doing in October 2026

Campbell's is in the news for its people and its plants. FinanceBuzz reported on September 21 that the company ended soup production at a longtime Texas plant, cutting over 200 jobs. On October 15 Manufacturing Dive reported that Campbell's is funding a Per Scholas training program in Milwaukee, with $500,000, a 15 week course of more than 400 hours and a first cohort of 25 people. The topics are industrial electricity, fluid power, troubleshooting and precision maintenance, and the target jobs include automation technicians.

Campbell's headquarters in Camden, New Jersey, where Per Scholas toured the company's manufacturing facilities. Photo: Timviola / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Automated bowls are now easy to find. Yo-Kai Express began with a ramen vending machine in a San Francisco food court in 2018. Each machine holds about 40 bowls of frozen ingredients, and a 2026 profile says it can prepare a bowl in under 90 seconds. One stood in Taipei's Ximen station in 2025. In 2023 Soonggok Middle School in Seoul trialled four cooking robots, one of them dedicated to soup, which followed around 100 recipes set by the staff. The Korea Times reported on October 6, 2026 that robotic arms are taking over school kitchen duties in southern Seoul. Our school kitchen robot post covers the history behind those hot lunch kettles.

A Yo-Kai Express automatic ramen machine at Ximen station in Taipei, 2025. Photo: Junyu-K / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

I found no ABB soup project, so this section is a possibility. ABB's YuMi has served food in public: a YuMi finishes burgers at BurgerBots in Los Gatos, California, and it made coffee at Selfridges in London in 2018. That shows a dual arm cobot can work behind glass in a food venue. For soup, a cell would need a pot or pouch handler, a ladle or dispenser and a lid tool, which are tool designs rather than new robots. A GoFa CRB 15000 can be taught by hand and could load ingredient trays into such a cell.

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

What a soup robot has to solve before it reaches your kitchen

At home, a soup cooker already exists in a different form. A Vorwerk Thermomix TM6 weighs, chops, stirs and heats on its own, following recipes on its screen. It is a closed appliance, so it never carries a hot pot across the kitchen. That is the safer design for a household. A true robot that stirs a pot on your own cooker would face spills, burns, pan sizes that vary and a floor with children and pets. The cost of that arm, a camera and extra safety is the first barrier for homes.

A Vorwerk Thermomix TM6, which weighs, chops, stirs and heats with guided recipes. Photo: EinAnonymerBenutzerVonVielen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In a factory the questions are hygiene, heat and speed. ABB lists the IRB 1200 Hygienic for food handling, and its demonstration picks bananas rather than anything hot, so it is not shown with soup. A robot near a kettle must tolerate steam and washdown, and it must never leave grease or particles in the product. Programs for the cell can be simulated first in RobotStudio, where reach, cycle time and the path around the vessel are checked before anything is built.

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

Heavy work is already automated at the end of the canned soup line. ABB palletizers such as the IRB 660 stack boxed products, as shown here, and the post on canned food production follows that story from Appert onward. The open problems for soup are the skills to maintain these cells and the question of who is liable when a robot serves something hot. The Campbell's program targets that last skill, training technicians to keep automated lines running.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizing robot stacking boxed products at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

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