Grocery Bagging Robot: From the Till to ABB Arms

How the grocery bagging robot grew out of paper bags, packers at the till and the 1986 self-checkout, and where ABB item pickers and cobots could pack orders.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/7/20265 min read

Bagging is the last job at the checkout and one of the hardest to automate. A grocery bagging robot has to pick up soup cans, bread, eggs and bags of grapes, decide what goes at the bottom and close the bag without crushing anything. This post follows the job from the paper bag and the first self-service stores, through packers at the till and the self-checkout, to research robots that bag groceries with soft grippers. It also looks at which ABB robots could do this work in stores and in the back rooms that pack online orders. ABB has no grocery bagging product, so that part is a possibility.

Empty supermarket checkout lanes with card readers and brown paper bags hanging at the end of the counter

A checkout aisle at a Publix store in Orlando, Florida, with paper bags ready at the bagging end. Photo: Nielsoncaetanosalmeron / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

How groceries were packed before robots

Packing groceries by hand needed a good bag first. In 1871 Margaret E. Knight received a patent for a machine that made flat-bottomed paper bags, after a court fight with a machinist named Charles Annan who had copied her design. A bag that stood up on its own could be filled at the counter. In 1916 Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly in Memphis, Tennessee, where shoppers took the goods off the shelves themselves and paid at a checkout counter.

Old black and white photo of wooden checkout counters and turnstiles inside an early grocery store

The lobby and checkout counters of a Piggly Wiggly self-service store, 1917. Photo: Clarence Saunders via Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

As supermarkets grew after the Second World War, the checkout became a two-person job in many stores: a cashier rang up the items and a packer filled the bags. The bags changed too. The Swedish engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin developed the lightweight plastic shopping bag at Celloplast in Norrköping in the early 1960s, and Celloplast patented it in 1965. Kroger, the Cincinnati grocery chain, began replacing its paper bags with plastic in 1982, and Safeway followed soon after.

Black and white photo of a large supermarket with cash registers in front and long shelves behind

A supermarket with a row of checkout stands in the foreground, 1955. Photo: Seattle Municipal Archives / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The first serious attempt to take people out of the checkout came in 1986. David R. Humble invented the self-checkout at CheckRobot Inc. in Deerfield Beach, Florida, and the first machine went into a Kroger store near Atlanta, Georgia, in July 1986. Self-checkout moved the scanning and the bagging onto the shopper. It also added the bagging area scale, which checks the weight of each item placed in the bag against stored data and lets the customer go on only when the weights match. The packing itself still needed human hands.

Row of self-checkout machines under a red Self checkout sign with shoppers using them

Shoppers scan and bag their own items at self-checkout machines in a UK supermarket, 2008. Photo: pin add / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Self-checkout doubts and the first bagging robots

Self-checkout is now under pressure. On 17 September 2026 CNN Business ran a story headlined "The humans are rejecting the machines that were supposed to help them". On 22 September Retail Brew reported that the number of retailers using self-checkout fell 16 percent, citing Toast. On 1 October the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that a new San Francisco plan could limit self-checkout, while grocers warned of longer lines and higher prices. Many stores also keep staffed lanes where a cashier or a bagger packs the shopping.

Woman in a red jacket packing groceries into a bag at a checkout while a cashier scans items

Customers bag their own groceries at a self-bagging check stand at the Peterson Air Force Base commissary, Colorado, 2018. Photo: Joshua Arends / U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robots that bag are still mostly in labs. At MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, researchers built RoboGrocery, shown in June 2024. An RGB-D camera identifies items coming down a conveyor and estimates their size, soft fingers pick them up and pressure sensors in the gripper judge how delicate each item is. An algorithm gives each item a delicacy score, so grapes, bread and muffins wait to the side while cans and boxes go straight into the bag. Lead researcher Annan Zhang said the system was not quite ready for commercial deployment.

Row of self-checkout terminals with yellow bags hanging below orange signs in a supermarket

Self-checkout stations with yellow shopping bags at a Billa supermarket in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, 2026. Photo: Bdx / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

ABB already sells robots that handle the hardest part, mixed items of unknown shape. Its Robotic Item Picker, launched in April 2023, uses AI vision and a suction gripper to pick items out of mixed bins, at up to 1,400 items an hour according to ABB. IRB 360 FlexPicker robots pack food into trays and cases at high speed, often programmed with PickMaster software. In principle a FlexPicker or a single-arm YuMi could sit at the end of a conveyor and drop scanned items into a bag, with the cell laid out first in RobotStudio. No store uses ABB arms this way yet.

White ABB robot arm with a suction gripper standing over two black bins inside a glass cell

ABB's Robotic Item Picker, a small ABB arm with a suction gripper above two picking bins. Photo: ABB

Where grocery bagging robots go next

The first real use is likely to be behind the scenes. Online grocery orders are packed into bags or totes in stores and warehouses, away from shoppers, where a robot arm can work at a fixed station. Here the item picker approach fits well: the robot gets a list, picks each item and places it in a tote in a sensible order. Robots that restock shelves face similar problems with mixed products, as described in grocery shelf restocking. Putting the same robot at the till, among shoppers, is harder.

Row of ABB delta robots placing small red packs into cardboard boxes on a conveyor

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items at high speed. Photo: ABB

A robot that works next to customers must be safe to touch, which points to cobots such as ABB's GoFa, which stop when they sense contact, and to safety functions that slow the arm when someone reaches in. It also has to keep up with a cashier, and it has to open soft plastic or paper bags, which are floppy and hard for grippers. Packing order is its own problem: heavy items go first, eggs and bread go on top, and frozen goods stay together, rules that human baggers apply out of habit.

Grey and white ABB GoFa cobot arm on a wooden table with small boxes and cylinders

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

Then comes cost. A staffed lane is cheap to build, and a robot cell with vision, grippers and safety gear has to cost less than the bagger's hourly wage over its life. Stores are already rethinking self-checkout because of merchandise losses, and a robot would add another machine for staff to watch. For shoppers at home the change may arrive through delivery: if robots pack more online orders in back rooms, the bags that reach the door will have been filled by a machine long before one bags groceries at the till.

Crowded numbered checkout lanes with cashiers, shoppers and racks of snacks

Busy checkout counters at a Walmart in Shenzhen, China, 2009. Photo: Hwangxiheng / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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