Here comes the roboshop
As more shopping goes digital, high technology helps supermarket chain keep up with demand
Walking into Countdown’s giant Penrose e-store, at first glance it looks like any other supermarket, with chillers and endless aisles of product.
But walk further into the vast
8800sq m fulfilment centre and you see the real star of the show: a
5.7m-high, 32m-long unit imported from the United States — like a giant vending machine, simultaneously picking product and packing the supermarket chain’s online orders.
The unit can hold 11,000 products and is restocked daily.
After the goods have been picked and packed into tote bags, 1.5m-tall robots pick up each order in a crate and zip it across to the drop-off area ready to be loaded into delivery trucks.
Countdown has spent tens of millions of dollars on the packing unit, and will do the same again in coming months as it prepares to install a newer version of the technology, complete with the ability to handle chilled goods, at its Christchurch e-store.
The unit is only the tenth to be deployed in the world, and the second in Australasia, designed and developed by Boston company Takeoff Technologies.
That’s a big leap of faith, though parent company Woolworths says it is not merely a material capital investment, but rather a “material strategic investment” as a larger share of the grocery market moves online.
The artificial intelligence-powered technology is what you would expect to see in one of Amazon’s fulfilment centres.
Sally Copland, Countdown acting managing director and general manager of digital, says the technology and facility will in time become a 24-hour operation. It is now running for 10-12 hours a day.
The technology went live last week after 21 weeks of installation and development, and was game changing for grocery fulfilment, Copland told the Herald.
“It’s a first for New Zealand to have this technology. It’s only the second in Australasia and it is really about us being able to automate, speed up and grow our service here.
“We’ve seen rapid growth in the adoption of our online shopping service, both in delivery and pick-up, and part of us getting this facility up and running was about servicing the growing delivery demand, which then means in our stores we can service the growing pick-up demand also.”
Countdown says the automation makes fulfilling online shopping orders five times faster, and it expects to be able to pick 15,000 orders out of its Penrose e-store each week.
It will use the store as a testing ground, to decide whether the technology should be introduced more widely to other “dark stores”: supermarkets dedicated to fulfilling online orders only.
Woolworths has another of these fulfilment units in Melbourne.
Overseas Technicians are temporarily based in New Zealand for the implementation of the fulfilment units, making sure everything is running smoothly and training staff on how to operate the technology.
About 10 staff at any given time are operating the machine.
Woolworths Group reported a 40 per cent growth in online orders in its first quarter of the current financial year, and noted that Covid-19 had accelerated the growth of its e-commerce business.
The Penrose e-store is staffed by approximately 200 staff who handpick perishable items for orders such as meat, produce, bakery items and frozen and chilled goods.
Countdown first launched online shopping in 1996 and has been a market leader in launching stores dedicated to fulfilling online grocery orders.
Despite its moves towards a digital future, with a much larger portion of shopping conducted online for delivery, the group said there was still room left for traditional stores and it would continue to open more supermarkets alongside e-stores.
This week Countdown opened its 183rd supermarket, in Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter.