The questions we get, answered straight.

No. It's month-to-month. Cancel with 30 days notice and we pull the arm out. We're confident enough in the unit economics to not lock you in. If it isn't paying for itself, you shouldn't be paying for it.

We don't ask you to. When we set up the arm, we agree on a fixed monthly rate based on your shift schedule, so if you run two 8-hour shifts, five days a week, you know exactly what you owe before the arm ever moves.

One day, on-site, for most lines. Our team shows up in the morning, mounts the arm, plugs in the robot to a regular outlet alongside your conveyor, and the first scoop is ready in minutes. Some ingredients or unusual setups take longer to dial in, so we budget up to a few weeks for those. No civil work, no plumbing, no programming on your end.

The arm has a 0.9 m reach and mounts to a base roughly 2.5'x3.5' in size. It plugs into a standard 110V outlet and draws 40W in operation, so you can run a dozen of them off a single circuit. No three-phase, no compressed air.

Almost never. The arm is designed to drop in alongside your existing line and use the same dishers, ladles, and containers your team is using today. If your line works for humans, it works for us.

For now, just scoopable ingredients: rice, grains, sauces, salads, sides, sheet-pan veg, anything you'd serve with a scoop or ladle. Force control is what makes this work: the arm feels resistance the way a human does, so it portions delicate items without crushing them and dense items without slipping.

Pick and place for items like whole chicken breasts and steaks is coming soon. If that's what you need, reach out and let's talk.

It matches a trained human plater on most tasks, typically 6 to 10 portions per minute, depending on the food and the target weight. For higher throughput lines, we run multiple arms in parallel.

Within ±0.25oz of target weight on most foods, often better.

Animo is designed to work alongside people on a food line. The arm is light (about 10 lbs), low-inertia, and force-sensitive, and motion forces are capped in software to keep contact gentle. We design each station to avoid routine contact with people, and we'd recommend walking your safety lead through the layout before go-live. Light fencing or guarding can be added if preferred.

Food touches the same commercial dishers, pans, and trays your team already uses. Vollrath^® dishers are removable, washable, and designed for commercial kitchens. The arm surfaces near the food zone are made with food-grade materials commonly used in commercial kitchen equipment, and can be outfitted with disposable covers or gloves if desired. Customers remain responsible for their own sanitation procedures and any food-safety certifications required for their facility.

We monitor every arm remotely. If something throws an error, we usually know before you do, and most issues we resolve over the wire. For anything that needs hands on the arm, we'll send over an engineer next day from our Brooklyn location. For multi-arm deployments, we can keep a backup arm staged that swaps onto your line in minutes, so a hardware issue never takes the whole cell down.

We are. The $9/hour covers all preventive maintenance, parts, and service under normal operation for the life of the deployment. Your team doesn't need to learn anything about the arm beyond starting and stopping it.

We can start with one station, one robot, one shift. So you can try it out at minimal cost to you, and if you like it, you can expand.