When life gave them lemons, Chick-fil-A got robots.
The chicken sandwich chain has automated a job that took workers thousands of hours a day and resulted in a number of injuries -- squeezing lemons for their beloved lemonade.
"So if you can picture this, at every single Chick-fil-A previously, workers had to squeeze about 2,000 lemons a day. That's how much it took to get the juice to make the lemonade," Bloomberg's Daniela Sirtori told KCBS Radio. "It was a very tedious task. And it took so long that it actually took the workers away from doing other stuff like, you know, actually making food."
Located north of Los Angeles, Chick-fil-A's lemon-squeezing factory is a marvel of automation. The entire process from receiving the lemons to packaging the juice is almost entirely machine-operated.
"The trucks are actually unloaded by this driverless forklift. Then there's these robot arms that handle the bins of lemons and dump them into the production line and pretty much everything after that is automated," Sirtori explained.
Once the lemons arrive at the plant, they go through several stages of processing. After being washed and sorted by size, the lemons enter large extractors that remove the peel and juice the fruits.
The juice is filtered and refined to meet pulp content specifications, only 12% to 14% pulp is allowed in the final product, before being transferred to bags that are automatically sealed. Robotic arms then place the filled bags into cardboard boxes for shipping to Chick-fil-A locations.
"There's not a person grabbing the bag and putting it in a cardboard box and then sealing it. That all happens with robots and machines," Sirtori added.
The facility is designed to ensure minimal human intervention, with the only manual labor being the removal of lemons that are damaged during the automated process.
Currently, Chick-fil-A only has one lemon-squeezing plant that supplies juice to all of its locations across the country.
While the company is not looking to build similar plants for other products at this time, it is considering automating other processes.
"For example, if you can picture it, at every single Chick-fil-A, workers are actually slicing heads of lettuce for the salad. And so one of the things that Chick-fil-A is thinking about is, 'OK, can we just send the salad bases already pre-chopped to the restaurant in a bag?'" Sirtori explained. "So that's the type of thing that Chick-fil-A and honestly many other restaurants are thinking about because there's a labor crunch. It takes a lot of time to do this stuff."
And it's a move that's being met with support from workers.
"A lot of them feel like they're overworked. You know, it's not like because they're making lemonade, they're sitting idle. A lot of the times, there's more stuff to do. And so ultimately the question is, as we keep taking tasks out of, for example, restaurants, if there will continue to be more tasks for people to do," Sirtori said. "For the time being, according to my reporting, my observations and the folks that I talk to, the answer is yes, there's still plenty of work to do."