Oil palm tissue culture offers a potentially practical route to clonal propagation of high yielding palms. However, current tissue culture methods are laborious and costly, and the performance of the cultures can be difficult to describe quantitatively. Computer control of bioreactor processes increases reproducibility and permits quantitative description of the growth of oil palm cultures. Even so, there remain unmet needs in the areas of online metabolite measurement and of automation of the tissue culture process. In this work, we apply Raman spectroscopy for non-destructive off-line quantitation of sucrose, glucose, fructose, nitrate, potassium phosphate and magnesium sulphate metabolites in oil palm bioreactor culture supernatants. We also explore the feasibility of using fluorescence to discriminate between different morphotypes of oil palm calli. Finally, we report the use of flow cytometry to sort oil palm suspension cultures on the basis of size; selected samples were deposited into separate wells in a microplate with one callus particle per well. The technologies described in this article contribute to the development of automated methods for moving and positioning oil palm cells, and for online measurement of metabolites in oil palm bioreactor supernatant.