Automation for recruitment in the food industry

• Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, labour shortages have multiplied in the food industry.
• Robotic automation is providing new solutions to labour constraints, helping the industry to meet the growing demand for online grocery shopping and the continuing demand for home pick-up. European grocery suppliers are leading the way in adopting these technologies, followed by their North American counterparts.
• Warehouses in Europe and North America are adopting robotic solutions such as the Skypod^® system from Exotec^® to improve working conditions for employees while increasing productivity.

The battle for talent

Let’s face it: the grocery sector is having trouble retaining employees.

This trend continued during the pandemic – in 2020, the attrition rate in the grocery retail sector rose to 60%, a 50% increase on the previous year, according to the Food Industry Association. The industry has not recovered since. In 2022, North American grocers are still competing to ‘win the war for talent’ as they face the pressures of supply chain disruptions and calls for wage increases to keep up with inflation. The labour market remains tight in 2023.

‘Over the past two years, food retailers have had to reassess and adapt almost every facet of their business,’ says McKinsey’s 2022 State of the Food Industry report. ‘Every aspect of the industry’s human model – at the corporate level, in-store and across all areas of the business – is undergoing upheaval.’

A sector in transition

Grocery shops around the world are learning that automation is essential to meet the changing demands of their customers. With the constant demand for online grocery, home delivery and in-store shopping increasing in the wake of the pandemic, warehouses need to be increasingly agile to meet a range of fulfilment needs.

McKinsey estimates that a third of food retail tasks could be automated in the next eight years, and the global warehouse automation market is set to explode (it was valued at $13.6 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach $58 billion by 2031, according to Portland, Oregon-based Allied Market Research). But few functions can be fully converted, notes McKinsey, so it’s up to food suppliers to find ways to integrate automation into their workflows to complement, not replace, their workforce.

‘There is a mismatch between the factors that employees consider important and those that employers consider important’, according to McKinsey. ‘If the last 18 months have taught us anything, it’s that employees are keen to invest in the human aspects of work.

The McKinsey report notes that the demand for specific employee skills is also changing. Physical and manual skills are becoming less important in the grocery sector – their importance is expected to decline by 17% by 2030 compared to 2016 levels. At the same time, the importance of high-level cognitive skills and social and emotional skills is outstripping that of basic cognitive skills. Grocery sector workplaces are changing and workers are adapting to keep pace.

Carrefour’s order processing centre in Plessis-Paté, France.

Over the past five years, the online grocery sector in Europe has grown by more than 50% to 2019, and retailers are turning to automation in response: some 55% of retail, manufacturing and logistics professionals, including those in the grocery sector, said they were considering automating their warehouses. In 2023, the European automation market for retail, including grocery, was worth $2.7 billion, and is expected to grow by 13% over the next decade.

Grocery chains like Carrefour in France have had no choice but to revolutionise their working methods. The company has invested in Exotec’s Skypod system, a robotised goods-to-person warehousing solution, in four of its micro-supply centres. The Exotec solution consists of a fleet of autonomous mobile robots that move goods between high-density storage racks and ergonomic order-picking stations without the use of conveyors or heavy machinery.

The Skypod system reduces the physically demanding and repetitive tasks, such as bending, lifting and walking, that manual warehouse workers perform on a daily basis. Employees work from ergonomic picking stations equipped with intuitive screens that provide users with instructions for order picking and stock replenishment. In this way, Carrefour has been able to redirect a large part of its warehouse workforce towards higher value-added tasks, while successfully attracting and retaining workers who prefer to work with innovative robotic systems rather than hastily scour miles of shelving in search of ordered goods.

This streamlining of the order fulfilment process has resulted in a series of benefits for the Plessis-Paté site:

• 99% picking reliability for all orders
• Increase throughput of over 13,000 product references by 4
• Home delivery in 2 hours, thanks to the ability to access any reference in the system in two minutes.
• Use of the full height of the warehouse to increase storage density by a factor of 4
• Fulfil 4,000 orders a day by consolidating manually picked items.
• The robots retrieve items from the warehouse and bring them directly to the operators at ergonomic order-picking workstations.
• Discover our case study on Carrefour.

The Skypod system can retrieve any item in two minutes or less and achieve a throughput of 400 lines per hour per station. For Carrefour, a chain of over 12,000 hypermarkets, grocery shops and convenience stores, the impact has been enormous.

‘The Skypod system allows us to work continuously on production,’ explains Mohammed Ben Aissa, Logistics Director at Carrefour. He adds: ‘It enables us to meet the very strict demands of customers with a satisfaction rate of almost 100%.’

What’s more, the system is quick to install and does not disrupt ongoing operations. The fastest installation of the Skypod system carried out for Carrefour took just six weeks. The company wants to use its system’s ability to rapidly scale throughput and storage independently to meet its exact needs as its business grows. The Skypod system enables throughput to be increased in a matter of minutes simply by adding robots. Storage shelves and order-picking stations can be expanded in the space of a weekend.

In the future, as the grocery sector evolves and the demand for e-commerce increases worldwide, automation will be a key lever for retailers to increase efficiency and speed.

Your warehouse is complex, your automated solutions don’t have to be.

With the complex challenges facing modern warehouses, ensuring your solutions are built to the highest level of quality and performance is crucial to success. Exotec’s Skypod system can help you transform the most fundamental aspects of your warehouse with elegant robotic solutions for people-powered warehouses.

The Skypod system is fully modular, allowing customers to deploy it in a matter of weeks and easily expand it without interrupting production by simply adding robots, picking stations or storage racks. More than 30 industry-leading brands, including Carrefour, Decathlon, Gap and Uniqlo, rely on Exotec to improve their operations and cost-effectively navigate rapidly changing business models while meeting customer expectations.

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