Robots for rent: small bakeries and food makers lease automation by the month

At a family bakery in Millbrook, a grey robot arm lifts trays of loaves from a cooling rack and stacks them into crates for delivery. It does this from four in the morning until the vans leave at seven. The bakery does not own the robot. It rents it, for a little over €1,100 a month, from a company based on the Eastmoor industrial estate.

Armature Leasing was founded two years ago by a pair of engineers who had worked in car factories, where robot arms are commonplace. They noticed that smaller food businesses were struggling to find staff for early shifts but could not justify buying equipment costing €40,000 or more. The company now has 46 arms in use across the region, at bakeries, a chocolate maker, a pasta producer and several catering kitchens.

Set up in a weekend

Each contract includes installation, programming and maintenance, and can be ended with three months' notice. Most robots are used for palletising, tray handling or packing, tasks that are tiring and cause back injuries. Engineers usually install a unit over a weekend, using a mobile base so it can be moved between stations, and staff are trained to teach it new movements by guiding the arm by hand.

Rhiannon Beale, who runs the Millbrook bakery with her brother, said nobody had lost their job. The two staff who used to stack crates now spend the early hours on decorating and on a new line of filled breads that has added about 8 per cent to turnover.

Nobody grew up wanting to lift four hundred trays before sunrise.

The robots themselves are collaborative models, built to work beside people without safety cages. They slow down or stop if someone comes too close, and their arms are padded at the joints. Armature says the most common call-out is not a breakdown but a change of product, when a customer needs the arm reprogrammed for a different tray size or a seasonal line such as hot cross buns.

Kofi Mensah, a researcher in workplace technology at the University of Wrenhaven, said renting could lower the barrier for small firms but warned that firms tend to become dependent on the supplier. If the leasing company raised prices or failed, he noted, a business might struggle to replace the machine quickly. Armature says its contracts allow customers to buy their unit outright after three years at a fixed price, and it is planning a second depot in Larchfield to serve food makers further inland.