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?
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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.
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It has often baffled me that an online grocery order is picked by an employee walking around a regular supermarket with a trolley (or several trolleys at once) picking items off the shelf which another store employee has already been paid to set out in a tempting way for the day to day punters. With little or no regard for convenience or shopping efficiency, the displays are designed to put the high profit items in tempting and prominent positions. You know how confusing it is when the supermarket decides overnight to put the dog food where the pasta was yesterday. The robot farm in an ordered warehouse must be far more efficient. On the subject of odd substitutions, Asbocat, my wife once ordered a four-pack of Smarties from Tesco, and we were offered a bottle of Soave as a substitution. Yeah, get the kids off that nasty sugar and colouring and onto a nice glass of Italian dry white instead!
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Just to be pedantic - the circumference of Earth is about 40,000km, so 1,100 robots doing 60km per day is more like one and a half times around the planet, not four times.
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Asbocat - the problem was more likely to be data entry. Pickers are usually restricted by the system with regard to the substitutes they can offer. So if the computer thells them that 'rolls' are to be subs for 'roses' then that is what they will offer.
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28 May 2018