All Hail The Year of the Robot: Morrisons Debuts UK's First Human-Sized Grocery Aisle Robots

Morrison's becomes the first supermarket in the UK to introduce human sized aisle robots.

According to Metro Simbi's tally, robots can now be spotted in three Morrison stores, Weatherby, Redcar and Stockton and will be primarily used to check stock.

Ben, this question goes to you.

Have you seen Morrison's new robots in action yet?

Number one and two, what's your take on them?

So I have not seen them in Morrisons as ladies.

You mentioned it's a free store trial and all the stores are up in the north of England, so A which is a good distance from London where I'm based.

But I do know a man who has so shout out to my old team member Toby Pickard over I.G.D.

who met with Morrisons and the Simba team last week and so I spoke to him last night, he kindly gave me the lowdown and he'd been up to see them.

So yeah, as you say free store trial, they've got tallies who are autonomously looping the stores twice a day checking up to 30,000 products an hour.

The use case is familiar.

We've talked about it, you guys talked about on this on the show before.

We've had retailers like BJ and Snooks talk about it at previous grocery shop shows.

They're checking inventory and they are checking pricing and promotions accuracy and simply talk about saving up to about 50 labor hours a week using it.

And what do we think?

Well, inventory management is everything in grocery.

It's everything.

And your P and L is based on getting the balance right between availability and waste, especially in short shelf life.

So you know, this is Morrison's in my age.

It's just the latest retailer turning to robotic technology to try and help drive that balance and drive the efficiency.

Yeah, Ben, I agree with a lot of what you're saying.

I mean, I think the other thing for me is that the, the Morrison stores are typically much smaller in size than what we've seen in some of the BJ's and schnooks footprints that they're rolling out in the U.S.

so what this tells me is that you know, there's actually still value in the investment in the robots doing the type of work that you're talking about saving the 50 labor hours a week even when you might have fewer SKUs and a smaller store floor pad that they're wandering.

So that, that to me is kind of the, the icing on the cake of what you just said because it's, it's proving out the use case regardless of store format.

Chris, what are your thoughts here, Tally?

We talked about it, but this is a new, new, new, new format across the pond.

Chris yeah, no, I mean, I think it's just, you know, further validation of 2025 being the year of the robot, which we've said.

And kudos to Simbi for, you know, basically inking all these new partnerships.

And so to me, like, if you're not at least having this conversation internally as an executive in terms of the value that robots can bring, you know, I think you're missing out.

The point I'd add to what Ben said is inventory is important, but the other thing that's really important when you're a grocer particularly is pricing.

You got to get your pricing accurate too, because you know you don't have the right sign on.

It means you're missing out on the vendor income that the CPG brands have are going to provide you to run a promotion to move those units through your store.

So that's also especially vital.