Chick-fil-A has replaced a labor-intensive and injury-prone task—squeezing around 2,000 lemons daily—with a fleet of robots, eliminating roughly 10,000 hours of manual labor each day. At the Bay Center Foods facility in Santa Clarita, California, a 190,000-square-foot plant now processes up to 1.6 million pounds of lemons with minimal human intervention. The automated system produces juice that is later mixed with water and sugar to create the chain’s signature lemonade served at its restaurants.
The move to automation not only frees up in-store employees to focus on customer service but also addresses significant staffing challenges. Mike Hazelton, Chick-fil-A’s vice president of supply chain procurement and operations, pointed out that relying on manual labor for such a tedious task was unsustainable given current labor shortages.
Inside the high-tech plant, driverless forklifts equipped with sensor technology unload lemon crates, while robotic arms handle the transfer of fruit into washing stations. Once cleaned, the lemons move over specialized rollers that extract essential oils—now refined and sold to the cosmetics and fragrance industries. This process has increased the utilization of the fruit from about 40% to nearly 100%.
After oil extraction, the lemons are sorted by size and sent through machines that slice and ream them. The juice is then rapidly processed, with pulp making up 12% to 14% of the final product. Mechanical jaws form bags that are filled with the juice, sealed, and inspected by an X-ray machine to ensure quality. The product undergoes a unique pasteurization process that uses 75,000 pounds of pressure for 90 seconds instead of heat, extending the juice’s shelf life to over 40 days and allowing distribution as far as Hawaii.
The fully automated production cycle, which takes about 45 minutes per batch, runs Monday through Thursday with cleaning intervals in between. While approximately 120 workers remain on site for maintenance and quality control, human involvement is now limited to tasks like removing damaged fruit.
This cutting-edge facility is an example of how restaurants are leveraging automation to enhance efficiency and boost sales. Industry experts note that only about 5% of U.S. manufacturing plants have reached this level of sophistication, largely due to the challenges of retrofitting existing operations. Other fast-food chains, such as Chipotle and Wendy’s, are also testing various forms of automation—from avocado processing to AI-driven order systems—as they navigate labor shortages and stiff competition.
By shifting repetitive tasks like lemon squeezing out of the restaurant environment, Chick-fil-A is not only increasing operational efficiency but also making its workplaces more attractive—a strategic move as the company expands both domestically and internationally.
