Online grocery keeps growing and grocers cannot hire pickers fast enough. The industry's first answer was the centralized fulfillment center, and it failed on volume density, distance from the customer, fresh, and CapEx. The micro fulfillment center was the compromise, and it still demands space, capital, and duplicated inventory. So eGrocery fulfillment came back to the store, where 280,000 people now walk the aisles picking other people's orders while regular shoppers try to get past them.
This is where grocery store robotics gets practical. *Blue Collar Robotics* designed a purpose-built robot for that exact job. It picks packaged center-aisle goods with vacuum suction, roughly 65% of a typical basket, with a remote operator watching and stepping in on the hard calls. The grocer pays a cost per pick, so eGrocery fulfillment spend moves from CapEx into OpEx, and Blue Collar reports cost reductions of as much as 50%. Associates get redeployed to fresh. The store can run a 24 hour picking clock that nobody can currently staff.
Hosts *Ricardo Belmar* and *Casey Golden* dig into the economics of eGrocery fulfillment, the jobs question, robot etiquette in the aisle, what China's robot deployments got right and wrong, and why grocery store robotics has taken this long to find product-market fit.
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*Retail Razor Show S6:E10*
*Released on August 18, 2026*
*Support our sponsor*
This Episode is Brought to You By *RetailClub.*
Retail and brand leaders can attend *RetailClub AI Festival* completely budget-free, plus get $1,750 toward travel and hotel. From the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, it's three days fully outdoors in Huntington Beach, *September 22 to 24,* with 2,000 senior leaders working through how AI is transforming retail. If you're shaping AI's future in retail, budget shouldn't be why you miss it. *Register by August 28* at https://retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast.
*Guest info*
*Hank Crawford.* https://www.linkedin.com/in/hank-crawford-a4a9755/
_Co-Founder & CEO_ of *Blue Collar Robotics.* https://bluecollarrobotics.ai
Hank Crawford is Co-Founder & CEO of Blue Collar Robotics, where he leads the company's mission to make in-store grocery picking affordable for retailers through purpose-built robots delivered as a service, pairing AI-driven autonomy with human-assisted teleoperation.
*Paul Harker.* https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-s-harker/
_Retired Chief Commercial Officer_ of *Woolworths Group.*
_Strategic Advisor,_ *Blue Collar Robotics.*
Paul Harker has more than three decades of senior leadership experience across Australia’s retail and FMCG sectors, including 33 years with Woolworths Group. Most recently, Paul served as Chief Commercial Officer for Woolworths Group, where he was accountable for the $51 billion Australian Food commercial portfolio. In this role, he oversaw commercial practices across more than 1,000 stores and helped lead large-scale enterprise transformation initiatives, including the modernization of digital systems and the integration of data-led analytics across complex supply chain networks.
*Chapters*
00:00 Teaser
00:48 Show Intro
05:34 Welcome Hank and Paul!
06:37 Why Warehouses Failed
09:02 Store Picking Tensions
10:28 Amazon Threat Reality
14:47 Robotics Hype vs Reality
16:34 Human in the Loop
18:34 Blue Collar Robotics Intro
19:46 Service Model Economics
22:35 How Store Deployment Works
25:48 Comparing Other Models
30:50 Automation and Jobs
32:35 Scaling Labor With Robots
33:43 24 Hour Store Operations
35:09 Accuracy And Quality Standards
36:48 AI Regulation And Safety
40:18 Robot Etiquette In Aisles
41:36 China Robotics Lessons
45:19 Selling To Risk Averse Grocers
49:36 Five Year Outlook And Jobs
52:19 Wrap Up And Where To Learn More
53:40 Show Close
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