Meet The Billionaire Robot Overlord Reinventing Walmart’s Warehouses:
Symbotic CEO Rick Cohen at the company’s test center in Massachusetts: “I am naturally paranoid, and I wondered who was going to disrupt us.”Rick Cohen spent his life building his family’s traditional grocery distribution business into a $25 billion powerhouse. But the 69-year-old knows the future is automation and is betting big on a robotics firm that’s building cutting-edge warehouses for mega-retailers like Walmart, Albertsons and Target—and is set to go public in a $5.5 billion SPAC deal.
“As big as C&S is, in hindsight we probably could be significantly bigger if I had been willing to raise more capital early on,” Cohen says. “You can never get it [capital] when you need it, so it’s best to get it when you can.” ick Cohen’s grandfather Israel started C&S Wholesale Grocers in 1918 with Abraham Siegel in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Back in 1989, Cohen had rolled out his first major technological innovation with a wireless warehouse management system that allowed the guys on forklifts to communicate with other workers in the warehouse. At the time, it was a breakthrough—the first wireless warehouse management system, Cohen says. “The workforce became much more productive. It was a huge disruption. Some people wanted me to form a software company. I said, ‘No, this is for C&S only.
In Symbotic’s warehouse robotics system, more than 400 robots zip along ten levels of storage—a scale of automation that’s hard to grasp. At the time, Target was trying to figure out what to do with one of its large distribution centers in Woodland, California. The retailer needed more space to keep up with rising sales in the Southwest, but was constrained in how much square footage it could add to the existing facility. “They said, ‘Oh, this is a perfect storage solution.’ We said, ‘We’re doing it for the labor savings at C&S,’” recalls Cohen.
Cohen delved into ways to make the technology more efficient. He wanted the inbound robots, which unpack pallets as they come into the warehouse, to get to 1,650 cases per hour, up from 900 in December 2019. To get there—“1650 or Bust,” as it was called–Cohen stood over the bots with a stopwatch. “It’s very hard to make the machines do it, but once you do it, it looks easy,” he says.
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