Grocery chains are waking up to the value of robots and seeing how they can help streamline the customer experience, says Jonah Bliss, publisher of the online newsletter, OttOmate, a guide to the future of food robotics and automation.
“The labor market has just gotten so disrupted in the last couple of years, where they (grocery stores) can’t fill positions; they can’t get people to stay in these positions,” Bliss said. “I think they (grocery chains) are being forced to reassess … like, ‘we have to do something different now.’”
Bliss says many of the more mundane tasks can be better handled by robots. “In an ideal world, that frees up humans to do more humane tasks, front-of-the-house stuff where you can actually greet the customers, interact with them and solve problems, and not just be a cog in the machine,” he added.
Collaborating With Robot Helpers
While robots may take over some traditionally human tasks, automation more often leads to job transformation: Humans can collaborate with robot assistants in a symbiotic partnership to maximize productivity, Bliss says. Human employees can be retrained and redeployed in creative and fulfilling ways, especially in offering customer service.
Badger Technologies, Marty’s maker, says it has deployed hundreds of robots in stores since 2018. Badger CEO BJ Santiago says the company’s automated shelf scans are 95% accurate, far higher than typical human accuracy rates.
“The ability to report on out-of-stock and incorrectly priced products with more than 95% accuracy proved pivotal to elevating store execution, lowering operational costs and increasing store profits,” Santiago said via email. “Moreover, the addition of product location data enabled stores to integrate daily updates into their mobile shopping apps, helping customers, online order pickers and associates quickly find all products.”
Robots that patrol a store’s aisles or warehouses provide “actionable data” and “valuable trending analytics,” Santiago says, which have become “critical assets in our retail customers’ quests to better understand customer buying trends and preferences, forecast commodities, prioritize replenishment and manage suppliers with greater precision and agility.”
As sophisticated as grocery and foodservice robots have become, they still have a long way to go, especially with robot selection of food for online grocery orders, says Donley of Brain Corp. Human pickers are far more “qualified at picking out the best, most ripe avocado than a robot would be right now. But where we can help is saying, ‘Yes, this store does have avocados available.’ And therefore this store can help fulfill the order.”
Bliss concurs: At the moment, robots are assisting human “pickers” to fulfill online grocery orders, he said, “but someday robots will be able to do most of the tasks involved in pick-and-pack operations. While that’s unlikely to gain much traction in the next two to three years, especially as they struggle with perishables, we’ll see broader implementation towards the end of the decade. Picking the right apple (or tomato) and not damaging the produce is still kind of a tricky thing.”
Dystopian thinkers from Aldous Huxley to Rod Serling have imagined worlds where robots displace people. More likely is a far more symbiotic future, a place where Marty and his descendants will work in partnership with people. “And hopefully, Donley says, “that leads to a better experience for both the customers and the associates.”
