Grid brings goods to the picker across ambient, chilled or frozen. The picker stays still and picks, at 400+ cases per hour. It is Grid's most commercially developed application, built for the daily supply cycles and complex store networks a grocery CDC runs on, and it takes the walking, manual marshalling and route planning out of the shift.
Conventional CDC picking walks pickers across large floor areas to build each cage. Grid inverts that: the floor moves the goods to fixed pick stations concurrently, under continuous AI control. The result is a pick rate that doesn't depend on walking speed, floor layout or picker experience.
Grid takes the walking out entirely. Cages and pallets move concurrently across the floor and present at a fixed pick station. The picker stands still and picks. Everything moves at once, so nothing has to move fast: retrieval time comes from concurrency, not distance.
The AI engine re-solves the floor continuously. When a wave changes or a new priority comes in, it doesn't queue for the next planning cycle — it adjusts now. Seasonal agency staff can be added without retraining, because the system handles sequencing, not the picker.
Grocery CDCs run to tight daily supply schedules. Grid's store-order sequencing builds and stages outbound cages in the right order for each store. This happens consistently, without manual marshalling or pick-path management.
Cases per hour per picker — manual walk-to-pick versus Grid goods-to-person, across a range of order profiles and store network sizes.
Labour cost is the largest variable in grocery CDC. But improve productivity and pick rate and you improve ROI.
High agency labour in grocery makes a productivity gain show up in the numbers from day one. The higher pick rate turns straight into more volume from the same team, or the same volume with less agency top-up. The dragging comes off the job, not people out of the building.
Adding agency staff to a Grid operation doesn't require route learning or process retraining. Temporary pickers reach full productivity faster because they work a fixed station, not a dynamic warehouse floor.
Grid operates in ambient, chilled and frozen environments without modification. One system, one integration, one software platform — across the full temperature range of a grocery CDC.
The same AI engine, scaled to cages, dollies and pallets.
Volumes and hours in — stations, tiles and throughput out. The Grid configurator gives you an indicative system on the spot.
Real deployments with measured results — starting with Wincanton's fivefold pick-rate increase.
We'll model pick rate, labour saving and payback period for your specific store network, SKU range and throughput profile.