Rising global populations place an ever increasing demand on food. Expanding globalization further intensifies the demand for multiple cuisines. This and the fact that food items are affordable when mass produced makes large scale manufacturing necessary.
Convenience foods (Ready to Eat [RTE] and Ready to Heat / Cook [RTH/C]) have been popular in the developed world since long now. Their inroads in the emerging markets such as India is a rather recent phenomenon.
Automation enables quality, productivity, and compliance in the food industry while also helping achieve the seemingly contradictory goals of flexibility and operational standardization. Although a late entrant, the industry is adopting automation and harnessing all its benefits as can be seen in the case of producing and processing convenience foods.
The future
of automation is here.