{"id":8364,"date":"2018-04-29T23:44:27","date_gmt":"2018-04-30T03:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/cs-wholesale-grocers-autonomous-vehicles-for-your-apples\/"},"modified":"2018-04-29T23:44:27","modified_gmt":"2018-04-30T03:44:27","slug":"cs-wholesale-grocers-autonomous-vehicles-for-your-apples","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/cs-wholesale-grocers-autonomous-vehicles-for-your-apples\/","title":{"rendered":"C&S Wholesale Grocers: Autonomous Vehicles\u2026 For Your Apples?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The grocery distribution empire owned by the reclusive New England billionaire Rick Cohen has built an in-house warehouse autonomation technology company called Symbotic (acquired the underlying technology in 2009), which has outfitted its network of distribution centers with automation systems consisting of autonomous robots. These robots work in conjunction with other familiar faces of a warehouse (e.g. stationary robots, conveyer belts, cases and pallets of goods) in rather elegantly simple ways. As the below diagram demonstrates, once cases of grocery goods are separated into individual cases by stationary robots and travel down the conveyer belt into multiple aisles, these autonomous robots race up and down the aisles (at speeds up to 25 miles per hour) to stack, store and retrieve cases. Unlike other warehouse automation systems where robots tend to be bolted down or limited to fixed routes and tracks (thus less flexibility in the types of activities they can do), Symbotic robots can travel untethered among storage racks. The embedded software instructs the robots to arrange cases in a specific order to assemble the \u201cperfect pallets\u201d mirroring the specific destination grocery store\u2019s layout (as requested by the customer, e.g. canned corn next to soup). These are then wrapped, loaded onto trucks and shipped out.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

To be clear, these robots may be small, but they did not come cheap for C&S. In fact, one of the biggest impediments to market adoption broadly has been the upfront cost. Equipment alone (excluding the requisite warehouse re-fitting, workforce and management training and subsequent maintenance costs) costs between $40 and $80 million. This is a meaningful chunk of change for food wholesalers and grocery chains that run on razor-thin 1-2% profit margins.<\/p>\n

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However, Cohen had a far greater vision and \u201ckill-or-be-killed\u201d sense of urgency that triggered the adoption of such far-reaching automation technology. He noted that if he did not invest in this type of automation, a competitor would, and within five years, be ahead. What resulted were significant cost savings in the three biggest expenses buckets in conventional human-staffed distribution: labor, time and real estate.<\/p>\n

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