Employees at S&F Foods dreaded lifting heavy cardboard boxes from a conveyor belt and placing them onto pallets for shipment all day. So Mike Calleja, the plant manager for the company, which makes frozen food for school cafeterias, hired a robot.
Buying a robot could cost as much as $500,000, and Mr. Calleja wasn’t even confident that one would work. Instead, he rented a robot from Formic, a firm that takes care of installation, training, programming and repairs. It costs about $23 an hour, roughly the same as a human.
‘We have very low turnover because we try to make jobs easier,’ Mr. Calleja said of the company, which is outside Detroit. ‘We are a small facility, but we produce about 65,000 pounds of food a day’ Stacking it was ‘a backbreaking job,’ he said.
In an era when manufacturers consistently list attracting and retaining workers as a top challenge, companies are automating some of the worst jobs in their plants as a worker retention strategy.
The robot rental model has the potential to transform the American industrial base by making automation accessible to small and medium-size businesses that have traditionally been slow to adopt new technology.
