Chick-fil-A Using Advanced Squeezing Robots to Conduct Huge Lemon Party

Talk about advanced squeezing technique.

Party On, Chicken

Chick-fil-A has built an armada of robots to squeeze citrus for its delectable lemonade, turning the God-fearing fast food chain's lemonade plant into a veritable lemon party.

As Bloomberg reports, the chicken chain's Santa Clarita, California plant is home to driverless forklifts, gigantic mechanic lemon-grabbing arms, automated rollers, and even robotic reamers that deliver, drop, clean, and squeeze the fruits.

Using the bots, Chick-fil-A not only creates the lemonade that's become its staple beverage, but also extracts oils to sell to cosmetics and fragrance companies hungry for that coveted lemony scent. Whereas human squeezers were only able to use about 40 percent of the fruit, this army of robotic juicers apparently manages to use nearly the whole thing.

Per figures that Chick-fil-A shared with the business publication, this automation saves up to 10,000 hours of work per day. According to one human worker who oversaw that hand job, the labor-intensive nature of that dirty work will not be missed.

"Squeezing lemons was not a fun job," Kurt Cahill, a senior leader at the company who helped develop the lemonade plant, told Bloomberg. "Nobody liked doing it."

Life Gives You Lemons

Whereas workers used to have to load small amounts of lemons into in-store juicers, the Santa Clarita plant's only human intervention comes on the conveyor belts that require people to pick out the bad apples — er, lemons.

After the driverless forklifts bring the fruits into the facility, they're sent through automated rollers that look like ginormous versions of the hot dog rollers seen inside convenience stores — except these ones have tiny teeth on them that extract the oils that now provide Chick-fil-A with a revenue stream that it didn't have before.

Human workers on the conveyor line then collect fruit that exploded from their intensive massages before they're loaded into one of nine huge extractors, which slice and ream the lemons before they're squeezed to completion by rapidly-spinning automated mixers. The pure juice that results is mixed after the fact with pulp before being shipped off in Franzia-style bags to stores, where employees add water and sugar or Splenda to finish the job.

Amid anxiety about artificial intelligence and robots replacing human workers, the removal of this tedious task doesn't seem all that bad — and the videos Bloomberg published of these fruits dancing at their lemon party are delightful, anyway.

More on automation: Amazon Robots Struggling to Keep Up With Human Workers