NEW YORK, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) -- Squeezing 2,000 lemons a day was such a pain for staff at Chick-fil-A, Inc. that the American fast food restaurant chain and the largest U.S. chain specializing in chicken sandwiches enlisted an army of robots to do it, saving a massive staff, reported Bloomberg News on Wednesday.

In a plant north of Los Angeles, machines now squeeze as many as 1.6 million pounds of the fruit with hardly any human help. The facility, larger than the average Costco store at roughly 190,000 square feet, then ships bags of juice to Chick-fil-A locations, where workers add water and sugar to whip up the chain's trademark lemonade, according to the report.

The automated plant frees up in-store staff to serve customers faster. Squeezing lemons was a tedious task that added up to 10,000 hours of work a day across all locations and resulted in many injured fingers. Removing the chore aims to make working at Chick-fil-A more appealing, key for a company looking to add hundreds of new locations while contending with a fast-food labor crunch, it said.

"The lemonade factory shows how restaurants are using automation to improve efficiency and wring more sales out of their stores as competition intensifies for diners and labor -- nearly half of quick-service chains say they're understaffed, according to polling by the National Restaurant Association. The shortage is expected to persist for years," it added. Enditem

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