Kroger is committed to building more automated warehouses with Ocado, an online grocer and technology group, despite slowing down their construction, said Ocado CEO Tim Steiner, reports Reuters.
In 2018 the companies made a deal to develop 20 automated warehouses in three years, called customer fulfillment centers, that would be operated with the aid of robotics. So far, only eight have been constructed with 16 more in the works.
"They are committed to building more, they just want to make those (existing) ones work as well as they can before they roll out loads–very sensible thing to do," Steiner said. "They expect to have loads of these warehouses. But when you do something new, you need to make it work really well before you scale it up massively."
To drive the function of the customer fulfillment centers, the company has employed a “hub-and-spoke” model wherein the hub sites receive and carry out customer orders, then are sent to spoke facilities that facilitate at-home delivery in the specified area.
On Thursday, the company announced that a new 70,121-square-foot spoke facility opened in Austin, Texas, expanding delivery in the region, working in conjunction with the Dallas fulfillment center. Full Story
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