Autonomous fruit picking robots utilised by the Summer Berry Farm Company are an example of a tool employed in the production stage of the food system (Holland 2023). The robots were developed and trialled in 2020 through a partnership between the Summer Berry Company in the UK and Tortuga AgTech (who function as partners) (“Robotics,” n.d.). Following this successful trial stage, there has been an increased roll out of the number of robots operating in the business. For instance, the Summer Berry Farm Company now has over 50 robots working on their strawberry fields and glasshouses across their British farms. The robots help increase efficiency in picking and harvesting crops through performing a variety of labour-intensive tasks on the farm. For instance, 15 robots operate autonomously and so need only one human supervisor. They can pick for up to 16 hours a day when the spring harvest begins and can operate both indoors and outdoors (Tortuga 2023). The robots also help the farms survive labour shortages as, in a post-Brexit climate, there are less EU migrants to pick and pack crops, such as in the remit of fruit picking (Kollewe 2022). Quality is also greater, with the robots able to pick the fruit with 98% accuracy and cause less bruising or crop damage than humans (Tortuga 2023). Additionally, the robots can help save grower money; provide greater plant-level information to growers to generate better operational, agronomic, and commercial outcomes on the farms; generate forecast reports; and help fight pests (using UV light technology for mildew and mite control) (“Robotics,” n.d.). However, there are many challenges associated with this tool which are likely to make its scale up difficult, especially outside the remit of fruit picking. For instance, the same tool may not be suitable for every customer or company (Tortuga 2022). This is because customers and companies each have different economics and variability in their cost, performance and reliability metrics. Tortuga developed these robots specifically for Summer Berry Farm Company’s location (with mud, dust, rain and unreliable internet) and needs (including how much and where robots needed to add value, and where trade-offs across cost, performance and time could or needed to be made), and so it may not necessarily be able to be deployed at other locations or for other tasks while remaining cost-effective over manual operation. Deep operational, agricultural, and manufacturing expertise is needed to develop a technology that will help grower customers at scale; the likelihood of this one tool being rolled out across many different agricultural contexts, and remaining economically attractive, is low. Tortuga is instead an argument for a slower scale up, with technology developed for specific contexts. This is reflected in the landscape of multiple failed robotics companies that have struggled to commercialise despite offering exciting technologies (Vanderborght 2019), and the difficulties experienced by robot developers in integrating hardware and software to make complex robots (Marcus 2012; Sparc 2016).