Online grocer drives growth with warehouse automation

THE FACILITY in Oberhausen, Germany allows Picnic to deliver groceries to up to 200,000 households in the Ruhr area.

Founded as recently as 2015 in Amersfoort, Netherlands, Picnic has developed into a leading European online grocery provider. The company is active in the Netherlands, Germany and France, offers a 10pm cut off time, and delivery times via electric vehicles  that are accurate down to the minute.

Partnership

Understandably, this places heavy demands on the warehouse, which is why the innovative grocer turned again to TGW Logistics. Following their first joint project in Utrecht, TGW Logistics implemented a highly-automated fulfillment centre laying the foundation for Picnic’s planned growth in the German market.

Picnic co-founder Frederik Nieuwenhuys, says: “TGW Logistics is an excellent partner that made this high-end project possible together with Picnic. The combination of the Picnic tech team and TGW technology demonstrates that we can offer our customers even better service and thus set standards in the industry.”

1,500 robots

The core element of the high-performance system planned and implemented by TGW Logistics is a shuttle warehouse where 1,500 robots move about entirely autonomously. Groceries and non-food items are stored there in three temperature areas ranging from -18 deg C to 20 deg C.

Customer orders begin at one of the more than 60 ergonomic PickCenter picking workstations or in the Zone-Picking area (which mainly handles high-volume products or fast-moving items). The orders are then consolidated in a buffer. Shortly before the trucks leave for the local distribution points, items are transferred to a robot-assisted system developed by TGW Logistics, which loads the customer totes into transport frames entirely automatically. Up to 33,000 customer orders can be processed per day.