Straight answers to what plant teams, candidates, and investors ask us most. If yours isn't here, email hello@merista.ai.
Merista provides operated robotic portioning for chilled prepared-meal factory lines. A robot portions each ingredient to target weight in the footprint of one worker station, runs an inline QA check, and logs every portion. Merista owns and operates the hardware — monitoring, recovery and maintenance — so there is no capital outlay for the factory.
The robot connects to the line a factory already runs, in the footprint of one worker station. It uses perception and weight sensing to guide each portion to target weight, deposits it with a food-safe arm onto the moving conveyor, and runs an inline QA check before the tray continues. Every portion and check is logged.
No rebuild. The robot occupies the footprint of one worker station, connects to the conveyor line a factory already runs, and works from standard gastronorm (GN 1/1) pans. It is deliberately narrow: no mobility, one task family at a time. The operating target from site prep to production is under four weeks — a target, subject to validation on your line, not achieved commercial performance.
The robot is designed for the rates typical of high-volume chilled prepared-meal lines — around 600 to 1,000 meals per hour — at a cycle of roughly six seconds per portion, and several robots can serve the same line as more stations are automated. These are operating targets, subject to validation on your line — not achieved commercial performance.
It starts with the high-volume ingredients portioned in bulk on chilled prepared-meal lines — beans, couscous, quinoa, diced vegetables, salads and similar — dosed to target weight. Each ingredient is validated off the line before it runs in production. Fragile and individual items — the pieces a fixed machine can never take — are the trajectory: capability is added task by task and arrives as a software update, not new tooling.
The robot is built for high-mix production: a new recipe, ingredient or pack format is a software update, not new tooling. The operating target for a changeover within a similar SKU family is under 30 minutes. For allergens, the food-contact utensil and pan set is designed to swap as one complete unit and be washed off the line, so a single validated swap separates allergen runs. Targets are subject to validation on your line.
Hygienic design is part of the robot from the start: food-safe contact materials, surfaces meant to be cleaned without disassembly, and a washdown-aware architecture. The robot is designed to move aside during the daily line washdown so the line area gets its full clean, and the robot's own cleaning regime is validated with your QA team before production. We state what is certified as certified and what is planned as planned.
The robot is designed to work alongside people in the footprint of one worker station, with safety and CE conformity part of the architecture from the start rather than retrofitted. Safety validation happens on your line before production.
Merista does: the robot is operated, not sold. Monitoring, recovery and maintenance are handled by Merista remotely, and the factory adds no maintenance headcount. Your team keeps running the line and refills ingredients on your schedule. Every portion passes an inline QA check before the tray moves on, and every portion and check is logged.
There is no capital outlay and no setup fee — Merista owns the hardware. The recurring fee is set as a share of the fully-loaded labor cost of the shifts each robot replaces, and floats with that cost rather than a fixed list price. The exact economics are built from the factory's own checkweigher and payroll data during a line walkthrough.
Usually not, and we say so. One robot covers one station across every shift the line runs, and the fee is set against the fully-loaded cost of the two shifts it replaces — so the economics work where a line runs two or three shifts. On a single-shift line the numbers rarely justify it; the walkthrough gives you an honest answer either way.
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. Merista's case is the high-mix line that is trying to grow: a fixed machine forces new products to be designed around the tooling you already own, while on a Merista robot a new recipe or pack format is a software update, not new tooling.
One visit, one line, no obligation. We take your checkweigher data and your fully-loaded seat cost and give back two numbers: what giveaway is costing you today, and what a robot at that station would save — per meal, per line, per year, in your units. If a fixed machine is the better answer for that station, we'll tell you so.
Merista was founded by the core team of REMY Robotics — the people who built and operated its autonomous kitchen platform in live, customer-facing service. The company is based in Barcelona, Spain.
Merista is selecting design-partner factories in Europe now. It starts on a single line and proves the payback there before anything scales, expanding only on the factory's say-so.