San Francisco Nonprofit Adds Robots to Meal Assembly Line

Project Open Hand, a nonprofit founded in 1985, prepares and packages meals for people with medical conditions including heart disease, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease. The organization operates from a four-story building in San Francisco's Tenderloin district and has faced a shortage of volunteers since corporate groups stopped coming after the Covid-19 pandemic.

The nonprofit rents two robotic arms from Chef Robotics, a San Francisco company that builds machines for plating food. The arms operate a couple of hours each day along a conveyor belt and can add about 200 meals per hour when running smoothly. Human volunteers then shift to other tasks such as chopping vegetables or cooking plant-based protein.

How the Robots Work The machines use interchangeable fittings to handle around 70 different ingredients. They scoop items such as potato salad into specific sections of meal trays but sometimes spill food, requiring a volunteer to wipe trays before sealing.

A sous chef at the nonprofit said the robots are not faster than people but help because volunteers are scarce. Chef Robotics CEO Rajat Bhageria said the arms turn a physics problem into a software problem, making the process more scalable. The company also supplies robots to Amy's Kitchen and Factor and is training its machines to assemble more complex items such as hamburgers.

Hand's CEO Paul Hepfer said the organization pays a subscription fee for the robots and hopes the experiment will attract attention from new technology companies in the city. The nonprofit still needs human volunteers for cooking, chopping, and delivery work. Hepfer said the goal is to show that technology can improve service quality and encourage more participation from local businesses.