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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Schnuck Markets Expands Use of Tally, Simbe Robotics’ Shelf-Scanning Robot

Missouri-based regional grocer Schnuck Markets announced today that it is expanding its use of Simbe Robotics‘ shelf-scanning Tally robot. Tally will be rolled out to an additional 46 stores, bringing the total number of Schnuck locations using the robot to 62.

Tally is a tall, autonomous robot that roams store aisles and uses a combination of computer vision and RFID to analyze on-shelf inventory. Simbe says that Tally is 14x better at detecting out-of-stock items than manual auditing, which results in a 20 percent reduction in out-of-stock items.

Schnucks first started using Tally in the summer of 2017 and expanded that pilot in 2018. It takes Tally about three hours to scan the roughly 35,000 products per store, but it helps give store managers a closer-to-real time assessment of store inventory throughout the day.

In-store inventory accuracy is perhaps more important than ever. The early stages of the COVID pandemic and subsequent panic shopping meant staples were out of stock at stores across the country. Even though those dark times passed and stores are back to being fully stocked, grocers are girding for the holidays and potential a virus resurgence over the coming months by stocking up.

When I interviewed him in August, Brad Bogolea, Co-Founder and CEO of Simbe Robotics, said that Tally can not only help with shocks to the system like what happened with the pandemic, but can also help provide more accurate inventory data for the increase in online grocery shopping. As anyone who has shopped for groceries online can attest, a big gap in inventory data means what you order may not actually be in stock when you pick it up at the store or it arrives by delivery.

Schnucks isn’t the only market that’s investing automation. Walmart is adding 1,000 Bossa Nova shelf-scanning robots to its workforce, and Woodman’s Markets is using Badger Technologies robots throughout the midwest.

In addition to Schnucks, Simbe is also working with Giant Eagle supermarkets here in the U.S. After an initial set up fee, Simbe makes its money by charging between $2,000 – $4,000 per month per store, depending on the size and number of stores.

Simbe Robotics CEO: Robots Help Prevent Empty Grocery Store Shelves

Can robots help prevent the empty grocery store shelves that we saw during the initial panic buying stage of this pandemic? Brad Bogolea, Co-Founder and CEO of Simbe Robotics, thinks so.

Simbe makes Tally, an autonomous shelf-scanning robot that roams grocery store aisles and uses computer vision and RFID to keep tabs on inventory. Simbe says Tally can spot inventory anomalies and provide analytics about purchasing and re-stocking insights.

Because Tally is a robot, it can spend its day going up and down aisles, giving store managers ongoing updates about product inventory. It is this near-real time snapshot of a store that Bogolea says can help retailers thwart outages during panic-buying sprees like the one we saw earlier in 2020, and also provide a better e-commerce buying experience for consumers.

Tally is currently being used in trials by grocers like Schnuck’s and Giant Eagle, as well as other partners across six countries. “We’ve had insights related to consumption patterns on shelves,” Bogolea told me by phone this week, “Especially in peak panic buying.”

Bogolea said the problem stores experienced during this panic buying was bad supply chain data. “Many of these stores operate on a replenishment system,” said Bogolea. He explained that “if there’s heavy distortion, retailers may assume a positive balance on-hand,” even though the products actually aren’t there.

The bad supply chain data, according to Bogolea, is a result of the manual inventory checks that stores currently carry out. If robots are used, shelf inventory count is more accurate and up to the minute (basically) because the robots can run multiple shelf audits throughout the day. More accurate data means that stores can respond faster when there is a sudden run on particular products to speed up replenishment.

But robots aren’t just helpful dealing with sudden pandemic buying. As the pandemic pushes people into record amounts of grocery e-commerce, there is a greater need for what the consumer sees online to match the availability in store. Anyone who’s ordered groceries online is familiar with ordering a basket of groceries only to get notifications prior to pickup or delivery that, whoops, that item was actually out of stock.

Bogolea said an additional benefit of using shelf-scanning robots is that they can free up human workers to do other tasks such as picking items for online orders and sanitizing the store and carts.

Simbe is not the only company making shelf-scanning robots. Walmart is expanding the use of Bossa Nova’s robots to 1,000 stores, and Woodman’s Markets is using Badger Technologies’ robots at its locations throughout the midwest.

Bogolea said that since the pandemic Simbe has seen an uptick in the amount of inbound interest in Tally. But despite all the promises of his company’s technology, Bogolea is the first to admit that adopting it is not like flipping a switch.

“Though there is stronger interest,” Bogolea said, “There’s a lot of work to deploy this type of technology.” As we learned from Albertsons at our Articulate food robotics summit last year, grocery stores, especially big chains, only adopt solutions that are already at scale.

Simbe has its own plans to scale up and build 1,000 robots over the coming year. Between it and all the other robotic players in the space, there’s a good chance you’ll be passing one in the grocery aisle in the not too distant future.

Tally ho! Simbe Robotics Raises $26M for its Inventory-bot

Simbe Robotics, which makes the autonomous Tally inventory robot for retailers, announced today that it has raised a $26 million Series A round of funding led by Venrock with participation from Future Shape, Valo Ventures, and Activant Capital. Additionally, Simbe also announced today that it is expanding its existing partnership with SoftBank Robotics America to include inventory financing to scale the manufacturing of an additional 1,000 Tally robots over the next two years.

Tally is an autonomous robot that roams store aisles using computer vision and RFID to scan shelves to check on inventory. It’s part of a suite of services from Simbe that provides analytics about purchases and insights about re-stocking management. Simbe provides the hardware for free and charges a monthly subscription for the software and analytics. So far, Tally has been put to work in trials at Giant Eagle and Schnuck’s grocery store chains.

Tally is just one of the robots coming to a grocer near you. Earlier this year, Walmart announced it would expand Bossa Nova’s shelf-scanning robots to 300 locations, and Ahold Delhaize ordered 500 “Marty” floor roaming robots from Badger Technologies.

While retailers may like the fact that robots are faster and more precise than humans (and the fact that they don’t take breaks or call in sick), there are still a lot of kinks that need to be worked out with robots. As we’ve written before, robots can make their human co-workers enjoy their jobs less, and shoppers don’t know how to interact with a cold, silent, sentinel (even if they have googley eyes).

Additionally, how long will robots be necessary for things like inventory management? Walmart debuted its IRL store earlier this summer which features banks of cameras installed and computer vision to keep a real-time eye on what’s in stock.

However, retrofitting a store with the cameras, software and sensors needed to keep track of inventory in that way is expensive and will take a long time. So until then, robots like Tally will probably find a place among the produce at plenty of retailers.

Grocer Giant Eagle to Spread Its Robotic Wings

There was a time when all you needed to make your grocery store stand out was a better selection of food. Those quaint days are gone as any food retailer worth its sel de mer now needs robots. Whether they are in the storeroom or out and about in the aisles, all the cool kids are getting robots: Albertsons, Kroger, Stop & Shop, and Walmart, to name a few.

Regional grocery chain Giant Eagle evidently got the robo-memo and will soon have its own automaton sailing up and down its rows of products. TribLive reports that Tally, a shelf-scanning robot, will be working at Giant Eagle checking inventory, identifying items put back in the wrong place and verifying price tags. Data collected by Tally can also provide insightful analytics about purchases, store presentation and inventory to store management. The robot, built by Simbe, has actually already been in use in pilot programs at a number of Giant Eagle locations in the Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Akron.

Same as just about every other grocery chain that adds robots to the roster, Giant Eagle insists that Tally won’t be taking any human jobs. Instead, the robot will assist humans by taking over tedious, time-consuming tasks (like going up and down the aisles, checking inventory).

Giant Eagle’s announcement comes just days after Walmart announced it was greatly expanding its robot program, adding shelf-scanning bots to 300 locations, as well as floor scrubbing robots to more than 1,000 stores. It also follows Ahold Delhaize’s news in January that it was deploying 500 “Marty” robots to scan for spills in its Giant Foods and Stop & Shop stores.

For those who keep track of this sort of thing, each of these robots is made by a different manufacturer. As noted earlier, Giant Eagles’ bot is made by Simbe, Walmart’s shelf-scanner is made by Bossa Nova and Ahold Delhaize ordered robots from Badger Technologies. In addition to keeping tabs on which grocers go robotic, we’ll also need to see which robots they are buying (and from whom) to see if there is a particular automated solution that is working better for retailers.

It should be noted, however, that the days of the shelf-scanning robot could be numbered. There are a number of companies building cashierless checkout systems that use hundreds of tiny cameras mounted to the ceiling which not only keep track of what people buy, but also give the store a continuous, real-time snapshot of shelf inventory. This sort of setup would be faster than waiting for a robot to make its rounds.

The fact that so many grocery stores are adding robots is just one of the reasons we created the ArticulATE food automation summit, happening next week in San Francisco. We’ll actually be talking food retail with Albertsons to see how robots play into its overall playbook. Tickets are just about gone, but you can still grab one today!