Picnic will probably open its automated distribution center in Utrecht in January. In that location, groceries are largely automatically sorted, packed and distributed. The online supermarket, for which there are still waiting lists, wants to provide 150.000 households with groceries from Utrecht every week.
The difference with other distribution centers is that an employee does not have to drive a trolley along the shelves to collect a customer's order. The messages must reach an employee via conveyor belts with the help of software designed by Picnic itself. He then packs the crate of groceries. Due to the extensive robotization, the distribution center can serve four times as many customers with half the number of employees, according to Picnic.
It does take longer to set up such a branch. The construction of the distribution center in Utrecht started in 2019. Picnic has invested 100 million euros in it and it will soon be able to employ up to a thousand employees.
Those workers received a hefty pay increase on Monday. Picnic has agreed this with trade union De Unie in a collective labor agreement that will apply from April next year. The online supermarket says it does not have any problems finding staff. The company uses temporary workers as little as possible and offers permanent contracts more often. “We prefer to look at commitment and talent than at experience or a piece of paper,” says co-founder Michiel Muller. “About 80 percent of our executives are homegrown.”
Picnic has not yet noticed much of the price increases of the products it sells. “We do expect that to happen,” says co-founder Frederik Nieuwenhuys. “We already notice it during construction, for example in the steel price. Packaging material has also become more expensive.”
Picnic, which was launched in 2015, currently delivers groceries in 170 Dutch places and has 750.000 customers and 10.000 employees. The company recently started delivering groceries in Leeuwarden, the first city in the north of the country to do so. The company is also active in Germany and France.
Also read: Road transport in the Netherlands has become much cleaner
