Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Stop & Shop

Stop & Shop Adds BreadBot to its Store Floor for In-Store Bread Production

Stop & Shop announced today that it has partnered with the Wilkinson Baking Company to install a BreadBot at its Milford, Mass. store, in a move that further illustrates the ways in which food production is moving to the edge, and pushes the grocery chain deeper into automation.

BreadBot was the belle of the ball at this year’s CES. The automated mini-bakery captivated conference goers with its ability to mix, form, proof and bake loaves as you watch. The BreadBot can make up to 10 loaves per hour, 24 hours a day, and can make a variety of breads including white, wheat, whole wheat, sourdough and more. Stop & Shop will sell each loaf for $3.99.

Stop & Shop adding BreadBot is interesting for a few reasons. First, as mentioned before, BreadBot is part of a new wave of companies pushing food production to the edge. In this case, instead of bread being baked at a central facility and distributed around regions, the loaves are baked on-site inside the store.

This in-store production means that shoppers can pick up fresher bread, anytime of day, without the transportation and carbon footprint costs associated with traditional food production. We’ve seen this type of edge production in the coffee world as well with Bellwether, which makes an electric, ventless coffee roaster that allows grocers and cafes to create their own coffee roasts.

BreadBot is also a notable move for Stop & Shop because it’s the second bit of — pardon the jargon here — paradigm-changing automation the grocer has entered into. In January of this year, Stop & Shop announced that it would be deploying a Robomart in the Boston area. Robomarts are self-driving, pod-like vehicles that are essentially mobile mini-marts that roam the roads. They can be called or stopped by shoppers with the mobile app and open up for people to purchase items on the spot.

Though to our knowledge the Robomart pilot has yet to start running, both it and Breadbot point towards a more automated future for Stop & Shop. This is actually part of a larger automation push from the grocer’s parent company, Ahold Delhaize, which is building out back-of-store robotic micro-fulfillment centers and deploying 500 in-store robots to scan for spills and other messes.

All of this automation, however, comes during a year where 30,000 Stop & Shop’s employees went on strike for 11 days over wage and benefits. Automation wasn’t reported as part of that discussion, but one assumes that when this current contract expires in three years, the number and type of human jobs will definitely be a point of negotiation. Especially as Stop & Shop said it plans to install BreadBots in more stores across the region.

Now That They’re in Grocery Stores, Has the Robot Backlash Begun?

Both Walmart and Ahold Delhaize expanded their use of robots this year. However, according to two big news stories in less than a week, their entry into the workforce is off to a rocky start. Is the grocery industry in for a robo-backlash, and what that will mean for the automation in that sector?

In theory, robots are supposed to take over the manual and repetitive tasks, like taking inventory, scrubbing floors or spotting spills and messes. This, in turn, frees up humans for higher-level tasks and the time to engage in more customer service. To this end, in January, Ahold Delhaize ordered 500 Marty robots for its GIANT/MARTIN’S and Stop & Shop stores, and in April, Walmart expanded its use of in-store robots to 1,500 locations. But at least initially, the theory of robots being efficient helpers is running into some harsh realities.

Last Thursday, The Washington Post ran the story “As Walmart turns to robots, it’s the human workers who feel like machines.” In it, The Post chronicled some of the issues the bots have been having in stores including breaking down, functioning erratically, freaking out shoppers and frustrating employees. As The Post writes, it seems like robots are creating the very problem they are supposed to be fixing:

But the rise of the machines has had an unexpected side effect: Their jobs, some workers said, have never felt more robotic. By incentivizing hyper-efficiency, the machines have deprived the employees of tasks they used to find enjoyable. Some also feel like their most important assignment now is to train and babysit their often inscrutable robot colleagues.

Then today, less than a week after The Post story, comes a story from The New Food Economy titled “Stop & Shop now has big, goofy-looking robots patrolling its aisles. What, exactly, is the goal?” It too, talked of its “Marty” robots malfunctioning, having limited functionality to begin with (something we noted at the time of the announcement), and creeping out customers (perhaps because Stop & Shop gave the robots giant googly eyes).

Some of these potential missteps in implementing robots could be because we are still in version 1.0 of this automation experiment, and there seems to be a mismatch between the customer expectations, robot design, and the tasks being handed over to robots.

The robots being used in the front of store (fulfillment robots in the back of house are a different story) are industrial looking. They are tall, cold and utilitarian in design, and move about in a very, well, robotic manner. Shoppers aren’t used to sharing aisles with an indifferent machine that is beaming a light to scan shelves for missing inventory or just watching the floor (with giant googly eyes) to see if anyone has made a mess. The Marty robot, we should note, doesn’t clean up any mess; it just stops and points them out for humans to deal with.

One has to wonder just how long-term these problems with robots will be. There’s a raft of startups looking to retrofit stores with banks of high-tech cameras in the ceiling to facilitate cashierless checkout. These cameras, aided by computer vision and machine learning, could easily take over spotting empty shelves and alerting staff about spills without the need for a robot roving the store. Walmart already debuted this type of invisible inventory management at its IRL store in NY in April.

This eye in the sky approach alleviates any creepy factor associated with bumping into a giant robot as you pick out a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, but it also has you shopping in a surveillance supermarket. As for employee issues, this is why Albertsons brings labor unions to the table at the very start of any automation discussion.

In addition to this being a story about busted robots, this is also a story about change. As the saying goes, the only thing people hate more than change is things staying the same. The way we shop for groceries is undergoing and will continue to undergo big changes in the coming year. Robots will be a part of that, and there will be problems that arise. It will be up to the retailers to figure out the right balance to avoid a robot-driven backlash.