eGrocery specialist Picnic invests in further automation

THE DUTCH online supermarket has partnered with TGW for the fulfillment centre in Oberhausen, Germany, which will be built by summer 2024. A few months ago, both companies opened a logistics centre in Utrecht which they had planned and implemented together.

Picnic was launched in Amersfoort in 2015 and has evolved into one of the leading European eGrocery suppliers in just a few years. It is currently active in the Netherlands, Germany and France. Orders can be placed using an app, and groceries are delivered using eco-friendly electric vehicles. If you order before 10pm, fresh, chilled and frozen groceries will be delivered right to your door the next day. Thanks to the ‘milkman principle’, the delivery is precisely on time and for free.

Picnic’s highly automated fulfillment centre in Germany will feature a FlashPick system, which is powerful, reliable and extremely flexible and thus enables the best customer service at a high level of efficiency. A shuttle warehouse with 40 aisles is at the heart of the system: grocery and non-grocery items are stored at three different temperature ranges, from 20, 4 to -25 degrees Celsius.

Customer orders either start at one of more than 60 PickCenter One workstations or in the Zone-Picking area – these are mostly products with a large volume and fast-moving items. Then, the orders are consolidated in an automated buffer.

Shortly before the lorries leave to go to the local distribution points, items are retrieved towards a robot-assisted system developed by TGW, which loads the totes with the customer orders into the transport frames fully automatically, thereby creating more efficiency.

Thanks to FlashPick, and the Picnic algorithms, the amount of orders that can be processed per hour are said to be best in class. "The project in Oberhausen is another milestone and marks the next level of our cooperation with Picnic. Their renewed proof of trust is a great acknowledgement of our close collaboration", says Hans De Sutter, managing director TGW Benelux.

Frederik Nieuwenhuys, co-founder of Picnic adds: “TGW has been a great partner in co-creating this best-in-class facility. The combination of the Picnic tech team and the TGW technology shows that we can lead the industry to provide even better service to our clients.”

For more information, visit tgw-group.com