Rented Robots Get the Worst Jobs and Help Factories Keep the Humans

Adapted from The New York Times, August 25, 2025. Copyright © The New York Times Company. Employees at S&F Foods, a frozen-food supplier to school cafeterias near Detroit, spent their days lifting heavy cardboard boxes off a conveyor and stacking them onto pallets for shipment. Plant manager Mike Calleja hired a robot to take the job over. Buying a palletizing robot can cost up to $500,000, and Calleja wasn’t confident one would work. Instead he rented one from Formic, a Woodridge, Illinois firm that handles installation, training, programming and repairs, at about $23 an hour — roughly the cost of a human worker. “We have very low turnover because we try to make jobs easier,” Calleja said. “We are a small facility, but we produce about 65,000 pounds of food a day.” Stacking, he said, was “a backbreaking job.” As manufacturers consistently list attracting and retaining workers as their top challenge, automating the worst jobs has become a retention strategy — and renting, rather than buying, widens access to automation. Of roughly 244,000 U.S. manufacturers, about 93% have fewer than 100 workers and 75% have fewer than 20, according to the Manufacturing Extension Partnership. Those firms often lack both the capital and the in-house know-how to integrate new equipment into their lines. “That’s where the opportunity is,” said Saman Farid, CEO of Formic, which rents robots to about 150 factories, from dog-food makers to auto-parts suppliers. Some plants report 100% turnover on certain roles. “When they adopt robots to do some of the most dull, dirty, dangerous, repetitive, backbreaking tasks, people stay, right? Because you’re not lifting heavy boxes 12 hours a day.” Formic was one of at least three rental firms founded in 2020, alongside Las Vegas-based AAA20 Group, whose palletizers lease for about $4,950 a month, and Germany’s RobCo, which acquired the assets of Rapid Robotics in January and is opening a San Francisco office in September. RobCo’s Lorenzo Pautasso says U.S. clients are motivated less by labor cost than by consistency: “It’s about ensuring the consistency of labor, that the people that are there today will be there tomorrow.” Matt Kunach, co-owner of MattPak, a detergent-pod contract manufacturer in Franklin Park, Illinois, rents three palletizers. The savings are modest; the real driver was injury risk. Every worker who had stacked boxes was reassigned, none were laid off, and some were promoted to machine operators and line leads. Rentals remain a small but growing slice of the market. About 113,000 transport and logistics robots were sold globally in 2023, up 35%, with roughly 5,000 available for rent, up 20%, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Silicon Valley investors are drawn to the recurring revenue: a Silicon Valley Bank report found that companies using the model “raise more capital and at better valuations.” Headwinds remain. This summer’s policy and budget bill lets businesses deduct the full cost of new equipment in the year it is placed in service, making outright purchase more attractive. Others prefer to keep the cost as an operating expense, or want to test solutions before committing while the technology keeps changing. Adapted and translated by AMIER from The New York Times report of August 25, 2025. Copyright © The New York Times Company. Read the original at nytimes.com.