Name: Ocado’s robots are out to change the grocery business
Uploaded: 2020-05-21
Duration: 3 min 52 s
Description: Ocado CEO Tim Steiner discusses the impact his company is making.

Ocado CEO Tim Steiner discusses the impact his company is making.

Ocado’s robots are out to change the grocery business

Tech

I wrote a story about a cod or KADO is a UK online grocer. It's only an online grocer. It does not have any physical stores. They were one of the first grocers in the world to have an online only operation where the orders are fulfilled from central warehouses. In the last five years, they've been selling themselves to other grocers as a kind of technology partner away to help those other groceries around the world adopt the same kind of technology that Avocado has, which includes these extremely automated warehouses. And they sell this kind of complete technology package other groceries around the world. So we began the business in 2000. We were up and running, serving customers in their homes by 2000 and two, and we expanded at that business until the I p. O. D. In 2000 and 10, with 427 million of sales the year before the I P. O in about 550 million sales the year of the I p. O. Look, I think the first thing with the pandemic is for a number of retailers in our space. Um, it gave us an immediate challenge. It was an opportunity, but it was a challenge, and that was We spent years building systems to try and encourage people to come into our shop, and suddenly we had more people coming into our shop than our shop could handle. And we found ourselves at one point having 100 times as much traffic as the peak we've ever seen before. New customers who are inexperienced with us come normally either to the app to the mobile Web or to the browser. In fact, when they knew it normally mobile Web or the browser, it's normally experienced customers who will download your app, and they will register to tell us who they are and where they live. Our average customer looks through the 55,000 item catalog and put together an order of 45 to 50 items, usually some of its ultra short life. You know, fresh bread or bananas or tuna steaks and something that obviously might be products that are actually using for cleaning the kitchen or the bathroom. Because it is happening with the aid of the robots, we can pick a customer's order in a matter of two or three minutes, whole order of 50 items. We started rolling out fully robotic pick stations where using vision systems and multi axis robots. And, you know, Griffith Systems, whether that suction or fingers with we're picking actual products from these boxes and placing them in the customers' bags directly, using fully robotic systems when they come in and say they want to slot. We're looking at all of the fans that we've already put into the system, and those vans already have commitments to go to customers. And we look at those vans and say, Could we get in each of the hours of the next three days and then the next three days could we get a van that Customs house with enough space on it to fit in order that we expect that customer to do? And if we can, we show those slots to the customer, the customer, select that slot and they then get effectively temporarily allocated to that van in the background. We have optimizers that are then looking at all the drops that on each of the bands, as the schedules are building up and decides, Can I make these this? Help this schedule more efficient, like switching, uh, drop onto another band. So we're doing that millions of times a 2nd. 24 7. What's happened now with the coronavirus, I think, means that e commerce grocery is not going to be a minority sport in our field. It's not going to grow to 10 or 15% and stop. It's going to become the mainstream distribution of groceries over time. And you can't play a marginal cost accounting game in that you need to come up with solutions that can do this, you know, at lower cost to serve, then your bricks and mortar stores did. That's what we've done in the U. K. That's what our solutions business is doing for our clients globally, mhm.