Robot-assisted loading of delivery vehicles
Online grocery retailer Picnic automates with TGW
TGW is building a highly automated fulfillment center for Picnic in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The online supermarket relies on a FlashPick system with three temperature zones. At the heart of the solution is a shuttle system.
Picnic was founded in Amersfoort in 2015 and has grown rapidly in the Netherlands and Germany. The company delivers food in more than 130 cities using eight distribution centers. The number of customers is growing and orders can only be placed via an intuitive app. If you order by 10 p.m., fresh, chilled and frozen food is delivered the very next day. Fruit, vegetables, meat and dry goods are delivered to customers' homes with zero local emissions using a fleet of electric vans.
Picnic's Fulfillment Center is divided into several temperature zones to ensure product quality: Normal temperature, chilled products and the deep-freeze area. This makes both planning and implementation challenging. Most of the goods delivered are stored in the shuttle. Customer orders start either in the zone picking area or at one of the PickCenter One picking workstations. The orders are then stored in the shuttle for consolidation. The proportion of food waste and packaging waste can be sustainably reduced thanks to the new solution. 20,000 m² of solar panels are used to generate energy.
Picnic co-founder Frederik Nieuwenhuys emphasizes: "The robot-assisted distribution center in combination with the electric delivery vehicles forms the basis for our producer-to-consumer concept. We use Picnic technology to bring fresh products directly to our customers' homes - without delivery costs. The partnership with TGW, one of the leading international providers of highly automated intralogistics solutions, brings together two teams with extensive knowledge of new technologies and software."
The robot-assisted loading system developed by TGW Robotics and Picnic enables the electric delivery vehicles to be loaded and unloaded quickly. "A challenging but all the more exciting project is now becoming reality. The distribution center is a milestone and marks a new level in the cooperation between Picnic and TGW," says David Hibbett, CEO TGW Northern Europe.
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