Overview
Time is our most precious commodity. Yet Americans make over 24 million trips to the grocery store every day, driving an average 4 miles to their preferred store. They spend an hour on average per trip and almost 70% of the time purchase fewer than 10 items, which equates to a combined total of 21 million hours — the equivalent of 2.5 millennia spent on grocery runs.¹ ² ³
Delivery held the promise of giving us back our time by having someone else pick and deliver our goods. Yet it not only takes a courier the same amount of time — almost an hour — to make a delivery on-demand, but the extremely high cost doesn’t justify the small added convenience. Then there is the importance of tangibility. Research shows that less than 2% of groceries are sold online in the US because 84% of consumers don’t trust someone else picking their fresh groceries especially when it comes to perishables like fruits and vegetables.⁴ ⁵
What if you could simply summon a mobile grocery store at the tap of a button, and pick fresh goods right at your doorstep, without having to drive to the store and wait in line or create a basket online and pay a high delivery fee?
Robomart has built the world’s first self-driving grocery store giving consumers exactly that experience.
For decades, consumers had the convenience of their local greengrocer and milkman coming door to door, and we believe that by leveraging driverless technology we can recreate that level of convenience and accessibility.
Market Evolution
Before 1900, shoppers in the US purchased groceries through a number of different specialty and general stores. ‘Meat was purchased from a butcher, fish from a fishmonger, bread from a baker, and produce from a vegetable stand’. Due to the fact that most shoppers would walk to the store, grocers needed to physically be close to their customers, so their stores tended to be small. By virtue of being small, they generated less sales, which led to higher costs and increased markups.⁶
From the 1930s to the 1950s falling transportation and storage costs were instrumental in the creation of the supermarket. The spread of the automobile and paved highways allowed for bigger stores further out on the outskirts of town, while advances in refrigeration allowed shoppers to make fewer trips to the store as they could hold larger inventories. Although a majority of consumers would drive miles to these outskirt supermarkets, there was still demand for access to goods closer to home.
This gap was filled by convenience stores, and in small part by vending machines, often available at all times, which helped provide greater convenience to consumers who didn’t need to drive many miles to get their groceries. However, due to pressures on stocking goods with longer shelf life, convenience stores eschewed fresh produce and other perishables in favor of unhealthy, processed snacks and impulse buys.
Each era has focused on one overriding assumption — finding a way to get products to consumers as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Consumers in the US have been conditioned to go to the supermarket and stock up on goods for weeks if not months. The rise of supermarkets, although beneficial in terms of price and selection, created several negative consequences.
Firstly, this had a direct impact on Americans’ health, as they ended up eating less fresh everyday. Secondly, this resulted in an increase in road traffic and congestion, with trips in gasoline powered cars leading to carbon emissions. Worst of all, this has led to lower access to food as people need to travel greater distances and spend more time shopping.
Robotic Mini-Marts
At Robomart we’re working towards a future of sustainability and accessibility, through our all-electric, temperature controlled vehicles.
More than a decade ago my co-founder Emad envisioned mobile grocery stores on-demand while we were working at Unilever, and in 2017 after spending years in on-demand delivery experiencing this problem first-hand, I knew it was time to bring our vision to life. We managed to convince our co-founder Tigran, a leading expert in autonomous vehicles, to join us on our mission. We are one of the rare founding teams in this space with deep domain expertise in autonomous vehicles, retail operations, and on-demand delivery.
There has recently been significant innovation towards building unmanned retail stores, as well as autonomous delivery robots. However, robomarts go one step further than either of these technologies. By combining the ease and convenience of checkout-free stores with autonomous vehicles, we have created a new category altogether. Robomarts have significant advantages over delivery vehicles and unmanned stores:
- By creating a new channel we give consumers a way to physically shop right at home with the ability to pick and choose their own groceries
- Customers don’t waste time creating a basket and waiting an hour or longer for their order to be delivered
- At scale robomarts will be minutes away, similar to Uber, so customers can get their shopping done in the fastest possible way
- By mobilizing the store we bring back daily freshness to consumers who no longer need to stock up for weeks or months
- By making our vehicles green we reduce pollution and emissions
We recently announced our launch with retailer Stop & Shop. We are incredibly proud of our team for this achievement and are excited to bring our vision to life with one of the most pioneering and forward-thinking grocery chains in the world.
Driving Forward
Our goal at Robomart has been to engineer the safest road vehicles, which is why robomarts have a top speed of only 25mph, never carry humans so they always prioritize the safety of everyone outside, and are built from a lightweight body meant to crumple. In addition to this we will be fully teleoperating robomarts in our initial deployments, which means there will be a human driver in control of the vehicles at all times.
We are big believers in the promise of self-driving technology. In fact, over the next decade we will see mass deployments of low-speed autonomous vehicles like robomarts before we see mass deployments of autonomous taxis. The reason for this is simple. Robomarts never carry passengers. They can be rolled out quicker and in phases as compared to taxis which need to ensure a perfect system in all conditions at all times. This is why we are starting with teleoperated vehicles that never go on highways and stay within residential neighborhoods, so that we can accelerate deployments and have a direct positive impact on consumers with a profitable business sooner.
We‘re excited to drive retail forward.
Learn more about Robomart here: robomart.co
