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Walk through almost any consumer-packaged-goods plant in North America or Europe and you will find the same primary equipment lined up along the line: thermoformers, tray sealers, flow-wrappers, vertical baggers, palletizers. The hardware is, by industry standards, remarkably uniform. What you will not find is a standard layout. Aisle widths, column placements, conveyor heights, ceiling clearances and process flows differ from one site to the next, often by a meter here or a meter there. The cumulative effect is that every robotic integration in CPG begins from a blank sheet of paper.
That observation sits at the center of the modular automation thesis advanced by Svyatoslav Stesin, founder and CEO ofrexR Robotics (RexR), a U.S.-based industrial robotics company specializing in modular automation systems for the consumer packaged goods sector. The gap between standardized machines and bespoke installations, in his reading, is the single most important reason why automation in CPG has stalled at the mid-tier. The technology is ready. The integration model is not.
“Linear automation has become the bottleneck, because it is not flexible,” says Stesin. “Standard automation is rigidly tied to a specific product. It starts at the structural level, with welded frames, and continues into the software. The moment a SKU is discontinued or moved to another line, you are stuck. You can sell the equipment, scrap it, or keep running an unprofitable product just to amortize the asset. That is what pushed us toward modular: instead of integrating at the level of the frame, we integrate at the level of the frame’s components, the columns and crossbeams. Lego pieces, essentially.”
The Inertia Problem: Why CPG Robotics Has Stood Still Since 2019
If the modular thesis is so straightforward, why has the industry not adopted it before now? Stesin’s answer is candid.
“The first industrial robot appeared in the 1980s. Active industrial deployment really started in the late 1990s. And even today, robot density is still low almost everywhere. The sales cycle in this sector runs up to eighteen months. It is a deeply conservative industry. My first PackExpo as an exhibitor was in 2019. I was at the same show in 2025, and the market leaders were showing the same hardware they had shown six years earlier.”
The inertia is structural, he argues, not technological. Demand for industrial robotics has consistently outstripped supply, which has allowed market leaders to concentrate their commercial firepower on the elephants of the sector: the Nestlés, the Mars, the global tier-ones with capital-projects teams of fifteen or twenty people. Mid-market manufacturers, the family-owned businesses with $50 to $100 million in revenue, ten or fifteen lines, and multiple SKUs on each one, sit at the back of every line-builder’s queue. When they are served at all, it is on the line-builder’s terms.
“They get told, ‘fine, but run a mono-product on this line,'” Stesin explains. “And yet the only reason these manufacturers can run two or three different products on a single line is that they are still using manual labor. Manual labor is genuinely more economical for them than the rigid automation on offer. That is the gap our technology closes.”
The closing mechanism is mechanical and software-driven at once. Quick-change magnetic end-effectors, reconfigurable control software and machine-vision modules allow a single cell to switch between products in under an hour. “Inside a single shift, the line goes from one SKU to another,” Stesin says. “Changeover used to be the enemy of automation. With modular hardware, it becomes a non-event.”
Building the Technology Before Picking the Market
RexR’s thesis did not emerge in a Silicon Valley garage. Stesin spent more than a decade building one of the first manufacturers of high-speed delta robots, with an international team spanning the Middle East, Europe and Southeast Asia, before founding RexR and bringing the company into the United States to serve the American CPG market directly. The geographic spread was deliberate.
“We always built the company with the understanding that we were training, taking the first hits, refining the technology, and then going to the markets where the real volumes and the real money are,” Stesin recalls. Demand exceeds supply. Even at twice the price of other markets, the payback for the customer still holds, and the access to capital is on a different scale entirely. So we decided to land the technology in the U.S.”
Entering the U.S. on Bosch Rexroth’s Shoulders
Bringing an unknown robotics brand into the United States from a standing start is, as Stesin describes it, “a problem that is thirty percent technical and seventy percent reputational.” RexR’s answer was to debut not alone, but alongside one of the most established names in industrial automation. In September 2023, the company arrived at PackExpo Las Vegas under a joint banner with Bosch Rexroth, supplying the motors and drivers inside RexR’s robots and effectively positioning RexR as Bosch’s systems integrator across the CPG vertical.
The pacing was deliberate. Rather than racing into a full commercial launch, the team used the trade-show window to study the market and lock in intellectual property. “The cost of error in the U.S. is very high,” Stesin says. “We decided we would not start operating at full speed until we had landed the IP.” The U.S. utility patent covering RexR’s modular framework was confirmed in July 2025. By that point the company had already opened conversations with potential anchor customers, including the global food major Cargill, whose products, as Stesin notes, “are present in almost every refrigerator in the country.”
With patent timing pushing the launch beyond PackExpo’s October 2025 window, RexR set its full commercial debut for PackExpo Chicago in October 2026. That show now anchors a broader rollout plan: a 5,000-square-foot showroom and final-assembly facility in San Jose, a network of integrator partners across all fifty U.S. states, and parallel pilots through the Tortilla Industry Association, where RexR delivered an educational keynote at the association’s April 2025 Las Vegas event.
Where Industrial Robotics Goes From Here
Asked where the industry is heading, Stesin sketches a broader frame. The next five years of factory automation, he predicts, will be defined by three convergent forces.
“Deglobalization is reshoring production into countries where labor is expensive, and that accelerates automation by itself,” he says. “Capital that was flowing into pure AI is now flowing into physical AI, the integration of specific hardware with specific software. And the new generation of plant managers is younger, more open to innovation, no longer willing to wait fifteen months for a working line. Meanwhile, food remains the least automated heavy industry in the world. That is the gap we are aiming at, with a modular approach.”
The argument lands as much as a market thesis as a personal one. The companies that win the next five years, in Stesin’s view, will not be the ones buying the most expensive robots. They will be the ones building the most flexible factories. “Modularity is what makes flexibility affordable,” he says. “And affordability is what finally makes automation universal.”