Tortilla Production: From Metate to ABB Robots

A packet of supermarket tortillas has passed through a long chain of machines: corn cookers, grinders, sheeters, ovens, cooling racks, counters and baggers. Tortilla production started as hand work done every day in Mesoamerican kitchens, and it now runs on lines that turn out tens of thousands of tortillas an hour. This post follows that change, from the metate and comal to the tortilla machines and corn flour mills of mid-century Mexico. Then it looks at where robots fit today, mostly at the end of the line where tortillas are counted, bagged, packed and palletized, and which ABB robots can do that work.

A warm stack of corn tortillas wrapped in paper. Photo: ProtoplasmaKid / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

How tortillas were ground and cooked by hand

Corn tortillas go back to the ancient peoples of Mesoamerica. In Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, they are called tlaxcalli. The essential step is nixtamalization, which the Aztec and Maya worked out using slaked lime. Dried corn is cooked in limewater, left to steep overnight and drained. The softened grain, called nixtamal, was then ground by hand on a metate, a sloped grinding stone, into a dough called masa. Grinding masa by hand on stone was slow, heavy work that had to be repeated every day.

A woman grinding corn dough for tortillas on a stone metate at a restaurant on Janitzio Island, Michoacan. Photo: Thelmadatter / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Shaping and cooking were done by hand too. The cook patted a ball of masa flat between her palms, or later in a hinged tortilla press, and baked it on both sides on a comal, a flat clay or stone griddle over a fire. Tortillas made this way are thicker than factory ones and go stale quickly, so they were made fresh for each meal. The comal also sets the pace: a cook can only fit a few rounds on it at once. After the Spanish conquest, settlers in northern Mexico began making flour tortillas from wheat, and those stayed popular in areas that later became Texas and California.

A woman in Oaxaca cooking tortillas on a stone comal. Photo: Omarolivaa / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Mechanisation came in stages. Motor-driven mills took over grinding nixtamal, and neighbourhood tortillerias sold fresh tortillas by weight, like the one photographed in Muna, Yucatán, in 1973. Mass-produced tortillas became common in Mexico in the 1950s, thanks to two inventions. One was the tortilla machine, which pressed and cut masa and carried the rounds through a hot oven. The other was masa harina, a dried corn flour that only needs water. The first industrial corn flour plant in the world, Molinos Azteca, opened in 1949. It later became Grupo Maseca, now Gruma.

The Tortilleria Muna in Yucatan, Mexico, photographed in April 1973. Photo: David Pirmann / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Tortilla lines today and where ABB robots fit

A modern tortilla line uses dough sheeters and extruders, and some machines produce 30,000 tortillas an hour. Corn tortillas are cut from a sheet of masa and baked in a continuous oven. Most industrial flour tortillas are hot pressed, which gives a smooth, strong round, while cheaper ones are die cut and baked. Gruma, owner of the Mission brand, even has its own machinery arm, Tecno Maíz, which builds tortilla equipment. In 2020 Mission Foods announced a 510,965 square foot plant in Plainfield, Indiana, planned to make 187 million pounds a year of tortillas, chips and flatbreads.

A Celorio tortilla machine carrying fresh rounds along its conveyor at Tortilleria Ruiz in Mexico City, 2016. Photo: Armando Gomez / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In Miami, the Michelin-recommended taqueria Taquiza closed its North Beach site on 31 July 2026 and reopened at its own commissary and tortilla factory in Little River, a move Miami New Times reported on 2 September. The restaurant still makes its own masa and tortillas. Factories of every size face the same last steps: after the oven, tortillas cool on tiered conveyors, then counters stack them, baggers seal the stacks, and someone has to put the bags into cases and the cases onto pallets.

Masa goes into a tortilla machine while a worker collects finished tortillas at Tortilleria Ruiz, Mexico City, 2016. Photo: Armando Gomez / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Packaging integrators already sell lines for bagged tortillas with a case erector, a robotic top load case packer, a case sealer and a robotic palletizer, using vision to read the orientation of each bag. We found no published ABB tortilla project, so the fit here is a possibility. ABB has shown its IRB 360 FlexPicker using vision to pick overlapping pancakes from a belt and stack them, which is close to handling tortillas. The IRB 365 is built to reorient light packaged products at high speed, and the IRB 390 FlexPacker handles heavier bags into cases with conveyor tracking.

An ABB IRB 390 FlexPacker packing meat trays at Torfresma in Brazil. Photo: ABB

What comes next for robots in tortilla production

The likely next step is the full end of line. A plant could pair FlexPicker or FlexPacker robots for case packing with IRB 460 or IRB 660 palletizers, which stack cases in mixed patterns for different customers. Flexley Mover AMRs could carry finished pallets to the warehouse. These cells are usually designed and checked in RobotStudio before they are built, so an engineer can test cycle times against line speed. Bread and cake plants already run similar cells, so tortilla makers do not have to invent the layout from scratch.

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

Handling bare tortillas is harder. They are soft, warm, slightly sticky and vary in shape, so most plants stack them with dedicated counter-stacker machines. Grippers and vision have improved, and hygienic robots such as the IRB 1200 Hygienic, built for wash-down areas, could take on more of the direct food contact work. For small tortillerias and restaurant commissaries, a countertop machine already does most of the work, and our post on roti maker robots covers the home and restaurant side.

The building of the former Sanitary Tortilla Factory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, now an art space. Photo: Daniel X. O'Neil / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

For a smaller tortilla maker, a robot cell has to pay back quickly, and it has to fit into a building that was laid out for people, carts and hand stacking long before anyone planned for a fenced cell. Food contact means wash-down rated equipment and strict cleaning routines. Staff also need to be able to change pallet patterns and products without calling in an integrator, which is where tools like Wizard easy programming and the FlexPendant help. Safety zones set with SafeMove let people work near palletizers, which matters in small plants with little floor space.

ABB palletizing robots on the UHT milk lines at Piracanjuba's plant in Goias, Brazil. Photo: ABB (ABB Robotics magazine 1/14)

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