Grocery Fulfillment Robot: From Store Pickers to ABB Arms

A grocery fulfillment robot has one of the messiest picking jobs in logistics. A single online order can hold frozen peas, a dozen eggs, a bag of flour and a bunch of bananas, and the frozen food has to stay cold while the eggs must arrive in one piece. This post follows how grocers filled orders by hand, from delivery wagons to the first online shops, then how dark warehouses and robot grids took over and what the latest Ocado news says about the business. It also looks at where ABB arms fit, from the Robotic Item Picker to the crate picking line ABB built for a Dutch fresh food maker.

Bots moving on the grid inside an Ocado warehouse, 2017. Photo: Techwords / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How grocers filled home orders before the robot grid

Home delivery is older than the internet. Around 1900 many neighbourhood grocers took orders at the counter or by note, a clerk gathered the goods from the shelves, and a boy or a horse and wagon carried them to the door. All of it ran on hands and memory. Online ordering arrived in 1989, when brothers Andrew and Thomas Parkinson founded Peapod in the Chicago area. Before its website went live in 1996, Peapod worked with supermarkets such as Jewel in Chicago, Kroger in Columbus and Safeway in San Francisco. Orders were filled from those partner stores, so the picking still happened in ordinary aisles.

Ellington's Grocery Store in Raleigh, North Carolina, with its horse-drawn delivery wagon, 1904. Photo: State Archives of North Carolina via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

During the dot-com boom, companies tried big dedicated warehouses instead. Webvan, based in Foster City, California, promised delivery inside a 30-minute window the customer picked, and at its peak it served ten US metro areas, among them the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Seattle and Atlanta. It had hoped to reach 26 cities by 2001 and filed for bankruptcy that year, after only three years of operation. In Britain, three former Goldman Sachs bankers, Jonathan Faiman, Jason Gissing and Tim Steiner, set up the company that became Ocado in January 2000. It started trading with Waitrose in January 2002 and picked orders in a warehouse that no shopper ever walked through.

A Peapod home delivery truck on a city street, 2016. Photo: Paul Sableman / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Robots arrived with the grid. In Ocado's warehouses, hundreds of small box-shaped robots run on rails over a huge stack of crates, lift the crate they need and carry it to a pick station. The Norwegian company AutoStore, founded by Jakob Hatteland, sells a related cube storage system and reports nearly 1,950 systems in over 60 countries. Packing that many battery robots together brings risk. On 5 February 2019 a fire started at Ocado's warehouse in Andover, Hampshire, which handled about ten percent of its orders. It burned for more than three days and was traced to a fault in a battery charging unit. The rebuilt site was fully operational again in August 2021.

A Webvan delivery truck, from the dot-com grocer that went bankrupt in 2001. Photo: Mark Coggins / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

What a grocery fulfillment robot does in 2026

This autumn's news shows the business is still finding its shape. On 30 September The Grocer reported that Ocado is selling a half-acre robotic picking grid with close to 100 robots ahead of closing its warehouse in Erith, planned for spring 2027. The grid was installed in 2017, went live in 2018 and handled non-food goods such as kitchenware and small electronics. A week later, on 7 October, the Australian Financial Review reported that Coles is exploring robots in its stores, and Sharecast said Ocado was in early talks with the supermarket. Coles already runs two Ocado warehouses, in Melbourne and Sydney.

An Ocado driver unloading a delivery of Waitrose groceries, 2007. Photo: Waggers / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

A grid brings crates to a station, and for years a person at that station took each item out of one crate and put it into the customer's. Ocado's latest design for an unnamed European retailer, announced in July 2026 and due to open in 2028, adds its On-Grid Robotic Pick arms for that step, along with 600 Series robots and an automated freezer. ABB has its own arm for the same job. The ABB Robotic Item Picker, launched in 2023, combines a small ABB industrial robot, a suction gripper and AI vision. It picks items it has never seen from mixed bins at up to 1,400 items an hour.

ABB's Robotic Item Picker, a small ABB arm with a suction tool inside a picking cell. Photo: ABB

ABB has already automated fresh grocery orders, in this case for supermarket shelves. Heemskerk Fresh & Easy in the Netherlands ships 3.5 to 4 million salads, pre-cut vegetables and meal boxes a week. On its line an ABB IRB 660 takes crates for each supermarket order, six IRB 6700 robots on a track pick them into slots for each store, and more IRB 6700s build stable mixed stacks. ABB and the IFR say that delivering store-ready orders this way adds about a day of shelf life. We covered the cold end of the same problem in our post on freezer warehouses.

An ABB IRB 6700 on a track picking crates of fresh food at Heemskerk in the Netherlands. Photo: ABB

Where robotic grocery picking goes next

The next step moves robots closer to the customer. The Coles talks point to automation inside or beside stores, where staff still walk the aisles with trolleys to fill online orders. A small grid or a picking cell in the back of a supermarket could serve a town without a giant warehouse on the edge of the city. The money problem is the one Webvan ran into. A grid has to run at high volume to pay for itself, and the Erith sale shows that even Ocado closes a site when the numbers do not work.

The order picking hall at Heemskerk Fresh & Easy, with ABB robots stacking crates. Photo: ABB

Shoppers at home will mostly notice the result in how their delivery arrives, if they notice anything. In the warehouse the hard part is still the item itself. Soft fruit, glass jars and loose vegetables give suction grippers trouble, so better grippers and AI vision decide how much of an order a robot can pick. As a possibility, an ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot could work at a manual pick station next to people, and an IRB 360 FlexPicker already handles light packaged food at high speed. Lines like these are normally simulated in RobotStudio before installation.

Ocado delivery vans parked at a London depot, 2019. Photo: Tomjhpage / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Safety and training will decide how fast this spreads. The Andover fire showed that a dense grid full of battery robots needs fire planning from the first day. Workers move from picking to supervising robots, clearing jams and repairing grippers, and they need training for it. Pallets of crates and frozen goods still need heavy handling too, and ABB's IRB 460 and IRB 660 palletizers already do that work in food logistics. If you want the store end of the same chain, read our post on grocery shelf restocking.

The suction gripper of ABB's Robotic Item Picker reaching into a bin. Photo: ABB

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com