THE ROBOT GROCER
online Pioneer ocado is further Ahead Than Anyone else in figuring OUT how To fully AUTOMATE grocery shopping And delivery.
less than 2 feet below the roof beams of a warehouse in Andover, in the southwest of england, hundreds of robots are swarming above a giant block that’s as wide as a football field and three stories high. it’s a hive of groceries—thousands of plastic boxes, many layers deep—stocked with everything from grapes to shampoo to cat food.
ocado built and runs this hive, and it could make one for you, too, if you’re game.
With about $1.4 billion in 2016 sales, the british e-commerce firm is the world’s largest online-only grocery chain. founded in 2000, some 12 years before instacart, it has since innovated its way through brutally complex logistical problems. “We’re dealing with 50,000 kinds of products, three temperature regimes, products that have to be segregated,” says cto Paul clarke. machine-learning software calculates all these aspects of the giant block—and in four dimensions when it factors in the time cucumbers go out of date. “We’re bumping up against moore’s law,” he adds, which is why ocado plans to eventually use a quantum computer to power the algorithms.
ocado’s robots zoom around the top of the block like rooks on a chessboard, sometimes within half a centimeter of each other. if one needs to reach a box four levels below, others
shift the ones on top within seconds. The bot then zooms down to a picking station to meet a rare commodity here: a human.
ocado’s employees still have a role putting the groceries into plastic bags. but that’ll change soon enough. ocado’s engineers are working on a robot hand that can carefully handle different types of fruit. They’ll be installed in ocado’s new plant, opening in south london next year, set to be three times the size of its warehouse in Andover. in nearby greenwich, ocado is testing driverless delivery trucks. ocado’s cofounder and ceo, Tim steiner, recently told analysts who had toured the Andover warehouse that “every human touch point is designed to one day be replaced by a robotic solution.”
The analysts ate it up. “ocado could even become lower cost than a customer doing their own shopping in stores,” gushed credit suisse’s stuart mcguire to his clients.
ocado is part of the reason why people in the U.K. purchase more of their groceries online than those in any other country besides south Korea. small delivery trucks bearing the ocado logo often trundle through britain’s suburbs, along with those from rivals Tesco, sainsbury’s and morrisons. The latter is the first chain that plans to use ocado’s hive. clarke says “multiple deals” will follow soon. “We’re talking to retailers in every continent except Antarctica.” —Parmy Olson