Ocado, the tech startup you thought was a supermarket

IN A cavernous shed on an industrial park in Hampshire, hundreds of robots are at work in the “hive”. In Ocado’s latest Customer Fulfilment Centre (CFC), 65,000 orders a week are prepared for some of the grocer’s 645,000 online customers. It is probably the most technologically advanced such centre in the world.

Instead of ferrying crates on a long line of conveyor belts, as many CFCs do, it uses a three-dimensional grid system, or hive, to assemble customers’ orders. Washing-machine-sized robots whizz this way and that on the top of the grid, pausing only for a second to pick up products and ferry them to “pick stations”, where people put the orders together. An air-traffic-control-style system choreographs the movements of the 700 bots scurrying over an area the size of three football pitches, with just half a centimetre to spare between them.