Inside Ocado’s warehouse, where robots pick your groceries

We look at the other side of supermarket groceries delivery, where thousands of robots work tirelessly to pack your weekly shop.

Do you do your grocery shopping online?

While it may cost a few quid, many of us prefer ordering from the comfort of our home. 

Yet if we’re not trudging around the supermarket, someone else must be.

Or rather something – because supermarkets are increasingly using robots to pick up your groceries for delivery.

Ocado has opened the doors to its robot-powered warehouse in Andover, where the future is taking shape.

Read: 20 jobs where robots are already replacing humans

Inside the warehouse

Since November 2016, when you order a delivery from Ocado’s Andover warehouse, a fleet of robots get to work.

One of these strangely-fridge-shaped devices will start moving around a huge grid of storage crates, picking up items for your delivery.

You can watch the robots at work in Ocado’s somewhat mesmerising video:

It takes around five minutes to collect an order of 50 items; a rate even the most determined of supermarket shoppers would struggle to equal.

With almost 250,000 storage locations in the warehouse, each robot covers around 50-60km a day, meaning the entire fleet of over a thousand robots travel the equivalent more than four times around the planet.

Sore feet anyone?

See this week’s top supermarket deals

Rise of the robots

With Ocado also doing the logistics for Morrisons, it’s very possible your delivery was packed by a robot.

Not all supermarket grocery picking is done by robots, however; Ocado’s other warehouses in Hatfield and Dordon have older conveyor-belt style systems.

Ocado told us that there are still plenty of people working in the Andover warehouse, many of them technicians and engineers, who keep the robots running.

However, there are a few personal shoppers picking items by hand, albeit with the help of ‘state of the art’ machinery.

Given that robots can’t do everything (yet) and that some of the best deals can be found at Aldi and Lidl, which don’t deliver, we won’t be able to escape supermarket aisles just yet.

You can watch Ocado’s longer documentary on its robots below.