Giveaway you can measure today
Hand-portioning overfills to stay safe. Every gram over target is product given away — plus failed checkweighs and rework on top. Your checkweigher data already knows the number; most plants are surprised by it.
From the team behind REMY Robotics
Stop giving margin away, gram by gram.
Merista is building operated portioning robots for chilled prepared-meal lines — robots that portion every ingredient to target weight on the line you already run. We are selecting design-partner factories, and we start with a number, not a commitment: what giveaway costs you today, from your own checkweigher data.
THE PROBLEM
You can measure this today.
On a high-mix line — 20+ SKUs, frequent changeovers, formats a fixed machine can't hold — this work is still done by hand. Three costs come with it, and your own data already knows the size of each.
The seats that cap your growth
Repetitive portioning seats are manageable — until you add a shift, win a contract, or widen the range. Then the same 3–5 seats per shift become the bottleneck: hard to fill, harder to keep filled, and multiplied by every shift you add.
Consistency at human pace
Portion weights drift with fatigue and turnover, and QA is a sample, not a record. Necessary work — and a poor use of human attention.
You can put a number on all three today — the giveaway from your own checkweigher exports, the seats from your own payroll.
THE DEAL
The economics, without the sales math.
The structure is the offer. Here is where the money comes from, in the order it matters — and where the risk sits.
Where the money comes from
- 01
Giveaway recovered
Portioning to target weight, every tray, recovers the grams-over-target you can quantify from your own checkweigher data — before a single robot runs. On expensive ingredients this can rival the labor saving itself.
- 02
Labor priced below itself
The fee is set as a share of the fully-loaded cost of the two shifts each robot replaces — about 25% below it, verifiable against your own payroll. The fee floats with your labor cost, not a list price.
- 03
Fewer failures, full record
Fewer failed checkweighs, less rework, and every portion logged.
Who carries the risk
- No capital outlay, no setup fee
Merista owns the hardware — nothing lands on your balance sheet, nothing to depreciate.
- Operated by Merista
Monitoring, recovery, and maintenance are ours; you add no maintenance headcount. Your team runs the line; we keep the robot healthy.
- Proven on one line first
We prove the payback on a single line before anything scales; expansion only on your say-so.
"Operated by Merista" is a division of labor, not a slogan. Here is who owns what on the floor.
Customer
Merista
- —Line & ingredients
- —Refill
- —Schedule
- —Cleaning sign-off
- —Robot health
- —Monitoring & recovery
- —Updates
- —Maintenance & spares
No per-robot fees, payback months, or fee bands here — the exact economics are built from your numbers during the walkthrough.
HOW IT WORKS
Connects to the line you already run.
The robot works in the footprint of one worker station, on the line you have — not a line you need to rebuild. It uses perception and weight sensing to guide each portion, performs the deposit with a food-safe arm, and runs an inline QA check before the tray moves on. Every portion and check is logged.
01 / Ingredient source
Loaded and refilled by your team, on your schedule.
02 / Weight-controlled deposit
Perception and weight sensing guide each portion to target.
03 / Your conveyor
Placed onto the tray already moving through your process.
04 / Inline QA
Each result checked and logged before it moves on.
05 / Operated by Merista
Monitored remotely; we keep the robot healthy.
Operating targets
Target~6scycle per task
Target<30minchangeover within a similar SKU family
Target97%useful uptime after deployment maturity
TargetBeat baselineportion accuracy to exceed your current manual line
Target<4 wksite prep to production
Built for the plant
Hygienic design, washdown-aware architecture, cleaning validated with your QA, and safety and CE conformity are part of the robot from the start. We state what is certified as certified and what is planned as planned.
Deliberately narrow
The robot is designed down, not up: the footprint of one worker station (0.8 × 0.8 × 2.0 m), no mobility, one task family at a time, standard gastronorm (GN 1/1) pans. Every subsystem we deleted is downtime you never see and cost you never pay. We don't automate everything on the line, and we don't pretend to.
WHY MERISTA, NOT A MACHINE
The honest comparison is with a machine.
On the right line, a single-purpose machine is a fine answer — and we say so below. Our case is the high-mix line: the few things a fixed machine physically can't do, plus the one lever it destroys — your freedom to grow and change what you make.
Your product range stays yours
A new recipe, ingredient, or pack format is a software push, not a re-tool. A fixed machine forces you to design new products around the tooling you already own. We don't put a ceiling on what you're allowed to sell.
One system, more of your floor over time
Portioning today; topping, inspection, and rework-adjacent handling as capability is added task by task — including the fragile and individual items a fixed machine can never take. The delivery mechanism — software pushed to deployed robots — is real today; the breadth is the trajectory.
Total QA, logged per dish
100% weight-check and a factual record for every portion — traceability a hand line can't deliver and a fixed machine doesn't either.
Capability compounds; the machine is frozen at purchase
Every deployment hardens recovery, QA, and task coverage for every robot in the field. The system you rent in year two is more capable than the one installed in year one.
On a low-mix, stable, single-format line, buy the machine — we don't compete there, and we'll tell you so in the walkthrough. We win on high-mix lines that are trying to grow.
WHY THIS TEAM
We didn't demo food robots. We ran them.
We built and operated autonomous food production across Europe and the U.S. in live, customer-facing service — years of uptime, recovery, and QA discipline, not a demo. That operating discipline — monitoring, remote recovery, maintenance — is exactly what keeps a robot on your line from day one.
15,000operating hours
99.9%order completion
<1%human intervention
<15 minmean recovery
10deployed sites
Operating record achieved at REMY Robotics by the Merista founding team
THE ASK
Start with a walkthrough. Leave with two numbers.
We take your checkweigher data and your fully-loaded seat cost and give you back two numbers: what giveaway is costing you today, and what a robot on that seat would save — in your units: per meal, per line, per year. Your data, your numbers, before you commit to anything.
- —One visit, one line, no obligation.
- —The giveaway read comes from your own checkweigher exports — not our model.
- —If a fixed machine is the better answer for that seat, we'll tell you so.
Book a line walkthrough
Or reply to your intro, or email hello@merista.ai.