Carrefour is expanding its two-hour grocery delivery service to meet growing demand

Find out how Carrefour rapidly expanded its operational capacity through an e-commerce warehouse automation project, in order to meet the growing demand for online shopping, quadrupling order productivity thanks to the Exotec Skypod system.

Carrefour: logistical innovation to support the growth of e-commerce

Who is Carrefour?

Carrefour is a leading multinational in the retail and wholesale sectors, with a network of over 12,225 hypermarkets, supermarkets and convenience stores across more than 30 countries.

In January 2023, Carrefour remained the eighth-largest retailer in the world by turnover.

The Challenge

In 2019, Carrefour transformed its warehouse in Le Plessis-Paté, France, into a centralised logistics hub dedicated to handling all e-commerce orders, as well as ambient and fresh products intended for both in-store collection (click & collect) and home delivery in the southern Île-de-France region.

The company faced a significant challenge: managing thousands of orders every day in an environment characterised by ever-increasing demand for same-day deliveries and increasingly stringent order accuracy standards.

To achieve higher levels of efficiency and performance in order fulfilment, Carrefour needed a solution capable of:

• Handling ever-increasing order volumes.
• To ensure ever faster preparation and delivery times.
• Maintain high standards of accuracy when preparing orders.
• Handling fluctuating sales peaks across more than 13,000 product SKUs.
• Optimising the available space, without the possibility of significantly expanding the warehouse floor area.
• In light of these requirements, Carrefour decided to partner with a specialist in warehouse automation, capable of supporting its growth and ensuring the necessary scalability for the future.

The solution: the Skypod system

System at room temperature:

Robots	Stations	Crate storage	Bins/hours	Shelf height
148	18	30.940	2,800	8.2 m

Refrigeration system:

Robots	Stations	Crate storage	Bins/hours	Shelf height
78	11	12.600	1.800	5.9 m

Key benefits

Enhanced customer experience

• Home delivery within 2 hours, made possible by the ability to access any SKU in the system in under 2 minutes
• With a fourfold increase in throughput, the system now handles over 13,000 product SKUs and 4,000 orders a day with ease

Operational efficiency

• The full height of the warehouse has been utilised to increase storage density fourfold
• A system designed for rapid expansion: robots can be added in a matter of minutes, workstations in a few days, and racking in a couple of weeks

 

The project is a concrete example of logistics automation for large-scale retail, where order fulfilment speed, scalability and storage density are key factors.

 

Discover Skypod®: the system chosen by Carrefour