Inside A Warehouse Where Thousands Of Robots Pack Groceries

Here in Ontario, Canada we have an online food delivery service ( [link] ) and they built a super-automated distribution factory to help run this (and all of their stores in the area). A distribution center in the UK has already mastered this: > The Ocado Andover CFC is a three-storey grid of storage crates containing groceries. On top of the grid a fleet of 1,100 robots grab items and deliver them to “pick stations” where “personal shoppers” assemble orders for delivery. According to Ocado, an order of 50 items takes five minutes to pick and pack. [link] [this video] Google "automated grocery distribution", there's plenty of examples. This is essentially unskilled labour moving boxes from one point to another. The exception is vegetables/fruit where a human discards the bad stuff before it goes into another box for delivery on a truck. 95% of that process could be automated. Including eventually the delivery drivers in between the distribution center <-> retail endpoint pickup centers (where consumers and last-mile Instacart/delivery drivers can go in person for pickup - I'm assuming humans will be needed for home delivery for a long time). Instacarts biggest drawback is the cost and how they nickel-and-dime you, but GroceryGateway is run by the grocery store itself, and it's much better and actually helps you save money by shows you all the deals in the interface (imagine sorting a grocery store by discounts and price, as you walk through it gets more expensive). There is very l

In terms of warehouses there's a fair bit of automation which replaces quite a few jobs - at my former employer's warehouses the pickers had robots drive all the stuff to them, and they were trying out robot pickers (they were able to handle ~30% of orders due to limitations in agility, SKUs had to be specifically whitelisted). You still need people to handle e.g. dangerous goods and handle the various fuckups in the system (e.g. due to poor master data), but when I was leaving they were not planning on any new "classic" warehouses. I don't want to disclose where I worked, but you can take a look at Ocado, they are in a similar space (although focused on a different target market) and expanding from being online grocer to making those FCs for other companies: [this video]