https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-chick-fil-a-lemonade/
Archive link: https://archive.is/xQDaH
Squeezing 2,000 lemons a day was such a pain for staff at Chick-fil-A Inc. that the company enlisted an army of robots to do it.
In a plant north of Los Angeles, machines now squeeze as many as 1.6 million pounds of the fruit with hardly any human help. The facility, larger than the average Costco store at roughly 190,000 square feet, then ships bags of juice to Chick-fil-A locations, where workers add water and sugar to whip up the chain's trademark lemonade.
The automated plant frees up in-store staff to serve customers faster, according to the company. Squeezing lemons was a tedious task that added up to 10,000 hours of work a day across all locations and resulted in many injured fingers. Removing the chore aims to make working at Chick-fil-A more appealing – key for a company looking to add hundreds of new locations while contending with a fast-food labor crunch.
[...] Chick-fil-A's process is "very cutting edge," according to Matthew Chang, an engineer who helps companies design and install automation and who wasn't involved in building Bay Center Foods.
He estimates that only about 5% of manufacturing plants in the US have similar levels of automation, in part because it's hard to retrofit existing facilities. While many food plants automate production and packaging, he said, they often lack elements such as the driverless forklifts and systems that stack boxes on pallets.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11, @12:45AM (3 children)
Chick-fil-A doesn't need H1B workers to squeeze lemons. Nor American workers.
It only needs paying customers, but then robots don't have money. And soon neither the American workers will.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Samantha Wright on Saturday January 11, @06:31AM (2 children)
But one question remains: Does each Chick-fil-A location squeeze 2000 lemons per day, or does each lemon take 5 hours of labor to squeeze?!
Because frankly I can't think of any other ways to reconcile these two statistics: 2000 lemons/day, 10,000 hours/day across the whole organization. What organizational unit uses 2000 lemons per day?
The article gets worse: they have 3200 locations—so each location processes fewer than 1 lemon per day?
The factory they opened to process their lemons "receives 30 to 35 daily truckloads of lemons, each carrying 50,000 pounds of fruit." — so at a rate of 2000 lemons per day, each lemon weighs 812.5 pounds?
If each of the 3200 locations uses 2000 lemons per day, then we get down to the slightly more reasonable statistic of each lemon weighing around 115 grams, which is just over the normal weight of a lemon (70-100 grams.)
...this is still something like 1000 litres of lemonade per location per day, which strikes me as a bit on the high end. This Quora answer [quora.com] suggests it would represent about two thirds of all the beverages sold. Does that sound reasonable to any patrons of Chick-fil-A? (They don't have them here.)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday January 11, @09:55PM (1 child)
They are extremely busy and high profit margin, so "maybe".
I have an interesting theory: Sell white label excess capacity. If the Chick-fil-A patrons are not thirsty enough this week, as long as you can make a profit making it cheaper than anyone else, ship the excess to Tropicana for grocery store products or even to other restaurants.
Nobody goes to Chick-fil-A for the lemonade; its all about the chicken. It's extremely good chicken. Which it better be for the price.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11, @10:53PM
Just a guess, but they probably freeze any long-term excess, and normal refrigerate normal day-to-day excess.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11, @12:48AM (7 children)
A pair of stainless steel rollers, three lemons wide, maybe with a little texture to grip them, and a ramp up to a chute for the whoooole line of however many of these you want.
An angled juice strainer underneath, where the husk falls off, perhaps with a swinging arm to knock things around, and a little bit of fanciness to catch juice that runs down with the peel. The peel is taken away by a triangular-shaped conveyor belt to keep things from splashing out too much.
This isn't a hard thing to make. Why is a damn robot needed? Just rebuild the whole factory in a shipping container. It'll be cheaper in the short-run.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Adam on Saturday January 11, @01:12AM (1 child)
Judging by the pictures, that's mostly what they're doing. The robotic arms are at the beginning and end where the system has to process or produce boxes and packages that are handled by humans.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday January 11, @01:28AM
Do you mean TFS was quoted with typos that totally change the meaning of the phrase?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11, @01:34AM
Don't the rollers also squeeze some of the unpleasant tasting liquid out of the skin and into the juice?
Best fresh lemon juice I've had came from a Hamilton-Beach juice press, like this (it was cheaper when I bought it ~40 years ago)
https://www.amazon.com/Hamilton-Beach-932-Commercial-Citrus/dp/B00015NN0S [amazon.com]
Works for other citrus--grapefruit, oranges, others(?) I've seen at least one automated juicer that (iirc) worked this way: slice in half, then press over perforated cone, discard the half-skin. It made wonderful juice, right in the grocery store.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by driverless on Saturday January 11, @02:18AM
Isn't this already done on an industrial scale, to manufacture "fresh-squeezed orange juice" by the library-of-congress... sorry, olympic-sized swimming pool load? On a much smaller scale, those on-demand automatic juice-squeezer machines you find at fairs and other public events have been around since pretty much forever. This seems like a bit of a johnny-come-lately story.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11, @02:14PM (1 child)
I hate internet experts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11, @11:28PM
I hate haters.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Saturday January 11, @10:02PM
They don't peel as well as you think, and the peel is where the bitter is in citrus.
I use a microplane by hand to "peel" citrus when I make citrus marinated chicken for fajitas, stir fries, etc. Its noticeably tastier if you keep the pith out. Don't overdo the garlic in the marinade as it'll swamp the citrus flavors. Browned/blackened microplane citrus peel tastes "ok" but burned garlic always tastes hideous.
That said, most of the people drinking sweet lemonade just want to chug something vaguely acidic and sugary, they're not going to care about the citrus notes. Although chick-fil-a is noted for being perfectionists in some regards so maybe they do care that much about their lemonade.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 11, @03:23AM (1 child)
How do traditional lemon juice companies like RealLemon do it?
Chick filA is pretty flush with cash lately. A hungry MBA would have outsourced the lemon juicing. Doubtful that most customers would notice the difference from a vertical monopoly lemon supply chain. Likely that they could increase profits by millions per year using bigger more experienced lemon squeezing operations.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11, @03:34AM
Yeah, but the CEO wants to open on Sundays too, and needs robots.
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Saturday January 11, @04:48AM
The rates of carpel tunnel on the lemon squeezing line were fairly high. So glad to see this finally being pushed through!
This is a big day for lemon squeezing Carpel Tunnel survivors.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Saturday January 11, @01:22PM
Why not buy a couple of those? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z08NMpS_Z_w [youtube.com]
Add a few modifications here and there and it seems you have a pretty scalable solution.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Saturday January 11, @02:18PM (2 children)
It's the show of having that lemon prepared right in front you.
Kinda like the premium "hand scooped" ice cream. The production of that ice cream may be 100% mechanized, but the final act is a manual scooping by hand instead of being presented with a machine extrusion to justify a premium price.
Starbucks is a master of presentation of a cup of coffee. Some people will gladly pay for all that extra presentation.
If the customer just wanted lemonade, he could have saved a lot of money by just buying a carton of it at WalMart. She's paying for the ceremony of a fresh preparation. Just as guys will pay a lot more for a draft beer drawn by a bartender from a tap than they will pay from a beer served in a can.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by owl on Saturday January 11, @03:42PM
Which was a thought that occurred to me. How are the lemonade customers going to react to losing that show of seeing the lemon freshly squeezed right in front of them in preparing their lemonade?
Because with this central lemon squeezing operation, the lemonade's going to be "out of a bag" just like the rest of the drinks on the soda line.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Saturday January 11, @11:32PM
In defence of draft beer, it is a different product to bottled beer; it tastes pretty different (assuming the publican knows how to handle a barrel).
But I agree, if I go out for a pint, I realise that I am paying mostly for the bartender and the premises (and here in the UK the alcohol tax). The cost of the actual liquid is incidental.