The roles you cannot staff
Three to five people per shift on repetitive portioning work, with turnover and absenteeism hitting the same stations again and again.
From the team behind REMY Robotics
Run the portioning line without the staffing fight.
Merista is building robotic portioning cells for chilled prepared-meal lines. We are selecting factories to automate hard-to-fill repetitive stations and prove the payback on one line.
THE PROBLEM
You know this production line inside out.
The hardest stations on the floor are the repetitive ones, and they are often the ones you cannot keep staffed.
Giveaway and rework
Hand portioning overfills to stay safe. Every gram over target is product given away, and inconsistent portions create failed checkweighs and reworked trays.
A line that runs at human pace
People need breaks, rotation, and recovery. The work is necessary, but the task is a poor use of human attention.
None of this is a people problem. It is the wrong work for people to be doing all day.
WHAT MERISTA IS
A portioning robot for the line you already run.
Merista is building an operated robotic portioning cell for chilled prepared-meal lines. The robot picks up an ingredient, deposits it toward a target weight, and places it onto the tray or bowl already moving through your process. It uses the footprint of one worker station and connects to the line you have, not a line you need to rebuild.
01 / PERCEPTION
Perception and weight sensing guide each portion.
02 / MANIPULATION
A food-safe robot arm performs the deposit.
03 / INLINE QA
Inline QA checks the result before the tray moves on.
04 / LOGGED
Every portion and check is logged.
PROCESS FLOW · PORTIONING ROBOT
OPERATED BY MERISTA
Target
<6s
cycle per task, subject to ingredient and line validation
Target
<30min
changeover within a similar SKU family
Target
97%
useful uptime after deployment maturity, with clear exclusions
Target
Beat manual baseline
portion accuracy to exceed your current manual line
OPERATED, NOT BABYSAT
Your team runs the line. Merista keeps the robot healthy.
A robot that becomes the floor manager's problem is not automation. The robot is built to be operated by Merista: monitored remotely, recovered automatically where possible, supported and maintained by the team that designed it.
Customer
Merista
- Line & ingredients
- Refill
- Schedule
- Cleaning sign-off
- Robot health
- Monitoring & recovery
- Updates
- Maintenance & spares
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.
The economics, in one line
The intended commercial model is a flat per-robot monthly subscription including hardware, software, monitoring, and support. It does not scale with every shift the way manual labor does, so the case gets stronger on two- and three-shift lines. Exact economics are built around your line during the walkthrough.
We do not automate everything on the line, and we do not pretend to. We start with one repetitive task, prove it in your production context, then expand only where the economics and reliability make sense.
WHY THIS TEAM
We did not demo food robots. We ran them.
At REMY Robotics, we built and operated autonomous food production across Europe and the U.S. in live, customer-facing service.
Operating record from REMY Robotics, where the founding team built and ran these systems
15,000
hours of operation across EU and the US
10
deployed sites across 5 cities
99.9%
successful order completion
<1%
human intervention in production workflows
<15min
mean recovery time
That is the hard part of food robotics: not the demo, but the years of uptime, recovery, QA, and support behind it. Merista applies that discipline to repetitive work inside food factories.
THE VISION
Portioning is the start, not the destination.
Food production is moving toward systems that run with more consistency, more traceability, and less dependence on hard-to-fill repetitive work. Merista starts where the work is most repetitive and the payback is clearest: portioning and assembly. From there, one task at a time, we help food factories move toward production that is increasingly autonomous, consistent, and traceable.
We are building that with a small number of factories that want to lead.
THE ASK
Show us one line. We will tell you honestly whether a robot can pay back.
A walkthrough is exactly that: we learn your process, look at the repetitive work, and give you a straight read on the automation case. No pitch theater, no obligation.