Czech online grocer Rohlik Group has spun out a new company to sell supermarkets the same fulfilment technology driving its 37% year-on-year growth.
Veloq “unifies the entire grocery fulfilment process into a single modular platform” the company said, covering automated picking, intelligent routing, inventory forecasting and personalised customer engagement.
It will work with supermarkets seeking to establish new, automated fulfilment centres. “We manage all of the complexity of setting that up,” Veloq CEO Richard McKenzie told The Grocer. “We would set up the automation, we would set up the software, we would do the training, and then we provide the support to make sure it works on an ongoing basis. So we handle that complexity.”
It has forged a partnership with grid-pick robotics firm Autostore, which will install its systems into Veloq client CFCs. Veloq’s AI-powered operations software – which includes dynamic queue and labour management within fulfilment centres, supply chain forecasting and real-time last-mile logistics optimisation – provides “the magic”, McKenzie said.
Veloq will also enable retailers to offer same-day delivery at scale from centralised fulfilment centres, something it says “no provider has yet delivered”.
“Everywhere I look and anywhere I can get data, same-day is the fastest growing segment of this market,” McKenzie said.
Larger grocers – at least in the UK – tend to favour the store-pick model of fulfilling online orders over setting up large CFCs at huge expense.
McKenzie said the store-pick model is “inefficient”. “You either have to pick when the store shuts, which limits your ability to do same-day deliveries, or you pick at the same time as your customers and you’re knocking them over and competing with them for stock,” he said.
“You get a much better customer proposition and greater efficiency from taking the volumes out of the stores. And then you can start to do the special things around the extra range, the faster deliveries and so on,” McKenzie added. “We’ve proven this works because we’ve got it out in five markets.”
Founded in 2014 in the Czech Republic, Rohlik Group boasts it has built “the definitive industry model for online grocery”. It delivers more than 1.3 million monthly orders and generates €1.1bn in annual revenue. According to Rohlik it delivers 94% of orders without damage or errors and has reduced food waste to 0.5% of revenue.
It offers a three-hour ‘click to delivery’ promise – with orders fulfilled from CFCs in Czechia and in Munich.
Veloq said its client onboarding process “is built for depth and long-term impact”, covering pre-implementation market assessments and infrastructure tailoring along with “a flexible financial model” to “align incentives”.
Veloq is taking on Ocado Group – which similarly has a retail arm serving as a proof-point for its tech – for its share of the market. Veloq’s grid-robotics partner Autostore had been embroiled in a long-running legal feud with Ocado over the ownership of patents.
Ocado has struggled with supermarket partners moving back to a store pick model, or reigning in ambitious CFC roll-outs. In November, Morrisons began phasing out deliveries of online orders from Ocado’s Erith CFC, while expanding its store-pick fulfilment model. Last year, Canadian chain Sobeys similarly put on pause a plan for another Ocado robotic warehouse and revealed the tie-up between the two businesses was no longer exclusive. And in 2023, Ocado client the US supermarket chain Kroger put its plans for opening new Ocado-powered CFCs on hold.
McKenzie – former Chief Commercial Officer at Ocado – insisted the market opportunity was “huge”.
“I’m not going to claim I’m going to beat the Rohlik valuation just yet. But this is a valuable technology,” he said.
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