The E-Grocery Automation Playbook

Grocers have learned two important lessons about automating e-grocery fulfillment in recent years:

1. E-grocery fulfillment is more complex than expected.
The process of filling orders for customers represents a fundamental shift in the traditional grocery model of customers fulfilling their own orders for free and introduces a number of new challenges grocers must address.

2.For a growing number, automation is the best path to e-grocery profitability.
E-grocery order volumes are reaching the level where manual picking is becoming unsustainable. Compared to automation, manual fulfillment is labor intensive, inefficient, more difficult to scale and struggles to keep pace with customer expectations for shorter deliver/pickup times.

Those two lessons are informing how grocers are moving forward with e-grocery automation – cautiously but steadily.