These robot-powered warehouses could save grocers—but first they need to survive the coronavirus pandemic

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The robots are mesmerizing. Inside a warehouse in Erith, on the outskirts of East London, more than a thousand of them glide across a vast steel and aluminum grid. Each is the size and shape of an office copy machine, topped with stubby antennae and a shining neon-green LED. Following individual routes, they whiz off, accelerating at rates rivaling those of a Ferrari. They stop on a dime, reverse, shoot left or right, or momentarily pause to allow fellow robots to pass—a meticulously choreographed electric ballet.

The robots’ grid is actually the top of a giant three-dimensional lattice—a modular cage packed with groceries. Each time a robot stops, it drops a clawlike attachment into the bowels of the lattice (“the hive,” as human workers call it), descending as many as three stories. The claw grabs the sides of a white plastic crate containing fruit, vegetables, cereal—any of 55,000 different items—and retracts it up into the robot’s belly. The robot then carries the crate to another grid square and lowers it into the “pick tunnel,” which sits beneath the hive on the warehouse’s ground floor. There, workers pick items out of the crates to fill customers’ orders, placing the groceries into red plastic bins, which are then loaded onto trucks for delivery.

This warehouse, or customer fulfillment center (CFC), as logistics pros call it, is one of the most sophisticated and automated on the planet, one that can handle many tens of thousands of orders a week. It belongs to Ocado, a pioneering British online grocer that is positioning itself as a white knight for the beleaguered grocery sector—and possibly other industries too—offering to help supermarket chains compete in an automated age.

Ocado’s robot-powered warehouses thrum with activity on ordinary days; since the coronavirus crisis erupted, they’ve been in roaring overdrive. The pandemic has given the company a chance to prove it can keep an online grocery business humming, even when its human workforce faces unprecedented strain. Yet at the same time, the crisis’s upending of daily life has threatened to knock Ocado off its growth trajectory, just when it seemed tantalizingly close to becoming a global force.