01 · INSIDE GURKERL'S SAME-DAY GROCERY FULFILMENT CENTRE

SHARON: Welcome to What's In Store, making sense of modern retail. I'm Sharon Yourell Lawlor.

RENEE: And I'm Renee Hartmann. In every episode we go behind the scenes of the retailers, brands and technologies shaping modern retail, connecting the dots between strategy, operations, technology and, ultimately, the shopper experience.

SHARON: Today we're in Vienna at the fulfilment centre of online grocery retailer Gurkerl, part of Rohlik Group. We've already spent time inside this operation, and what we saw challenged our assumptions about what's possible in online grocery, a full weekly grocery shop, thousands of products to choose from, and real abundance in categories like fresh food and bakery, all delivered at same-day speed.

RENEE: And having experienced the proposition as a shopper myself, you can really see why. We came back today to understand how they're making this work, and the role Veloq, the platform behind the operation, plays in delivering choice, freshness and speed efficiently at scale. We want to share with you what other grocery retailers can learn from this.

SHARON: That's what we're here to find out. Let's see what's in store.

02 · HOW ROHLIK GROUP BUILT A PROFITABLE SAME-DAY GROCERY MODEL

SHARON: We're joined now by Petr Lizner, Director of Strategy and Growth at Rohlik Group and Veloq. Petr, thanks for having us back.

PETR: Thank you for coming.

SHARON: Before we head inside, can you introduce Gurkerl and put its role within the wider Rohlik Group into context for our audience?

PETR: Gurkerl is one of the retail brands of Rohlik Group. We operate five different brands across five European markets. The retail business is about €1.8 billion in revenue, and Veloq is the tech arm powering the retail business, all part of Rohlik Group.

RENEE: Rohlik has an interesting history. You started as an online grocer first, whereas a lot of grocers came into online after starting as physical stores. How has that online-first approach changed how you look at the customer proposition and run the business?

PETR: When Rohlik started, we had the ambition to create the best online experience. That's why we designed the warehouse and the proposition the way we did, and it's one of the reasons we had to build our own technology from the get-go, there was nothing on the market that could deliver the proposition we wanted at the time.

SHARON: Same-day online grocery has a reputation for being difficult to make profitable, but Rohlik is profitable, and Gurkerl is profitable. What have you done differently to make the economics work?

PETR: Two things. First is the proposition, we've built a customer-facing proposition that customers love and keep coming back to, which drives growth and volume. Second is running an efficient site that operates on a same-day basis. We've achieved both through our tech stack.

RENEE: So you at, at Rohlik, and then you also have Veloq, right?

PETR: Mm-hmm.

RENEE: So you're playing a little bit of two hats here, one Rohlik as the retailer and then Veloq as the technology provider. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how the two work together, and where does Rohlik end and where does Veloq begin?

PETR: Rohlik is the retailer. Veloq is the tech provider. Veloq does the entire site design for this facility, we design the fulfilment centre, help select and build out the automation, and provide the tech overlay and know-how to run the business. Everything within these four walls is ours, the courier app, the router, and the front end the customers use day to day.

RENEE: We've been here already, and it's hugely impressive. But when you walk through here, it's easy to focus on the automation and the technology you can see. But how much of what makes this operation really work is actually happening behind the scenes?

PETR: An incredible amount. Managing a same-day business is tricky, and managing the curves of grocery demand while fully utilising your labour is the secret sauce, a lot of that you can't see. We'll try to give some insight into it as we go through the site.

RENEE: We look forward to it. And we talked a little bit about Rohlik and Gurkerl both being profitable, and I think today we're gonna see a lot of the automation that makes that possible and talk a lot about efficiencies and optimization. But the other side that really impressed me when I was here last time is really understanding how things are impacting the top line and the revenue growth, right? And so there's some pretty interesting statistics behind this story. Can you share a few of those with us?

PETR: I think one thing, what we're achieving here is we're enabling a full basket for customers. So not only are we delivering same-day within three hours standard delivery or 60-minute express, we're also delivering a full basket. So across Rohlik Group, we have different assortment sizes from 17,000 to 25,000 SKUs, and we're able to basically deliver that same day. The ability to have that big basket, and in here in Austria it's around 100 to €110, 30 different items typically, is one of the things that enables the profitability.

RENEE: And what about loyalty? Do you find that the offering and the breadth of products you're able to have is bringing people back?

PETR: Of course. We see loyalty in one example through our NPS, where we're operating at around 90 NPS, but we also see loyalty in the customer frequency. The customer frequency is between three and four orders per month, which means customers are doing basically their full weekly shopping with us, every week. So they really does create a loyal customer that comes back time and time.

SHARON: Exactly. Really impressive. Let's go inside and show everyone the operation behind these numbers.

03 · 18,000 SKUS: WHAT SAME-DAY GROCERY DELIVERY ACTUALLY MEANS

RENEE: We're in the sector with heavy, bulky items, beer, nappies, all kinds of large items. Petr, one of the things that stood out to us last time is just how many SKUs you carry, 18,000 in this facility, close to the size of a full grocery store. How critical is that breadth to your proposition?

PETR: It's super critical. If you want to give customers their full weekly shop, you need to give them the choice and everything they're asking for. We're in one sector now, but there are five different temperature zones in this warehouse, and a large breadth of assortment across all of them.

SHARON: Everyone talks about same-day delivery. What does "same-day" actually mean for the customer here?

PETR: For us it's always-on, true same-day: three-hour standard delivery, or 60-minute express. Delivery windows matter too, we offer a one-hour standard window, but if a customer wants it narrowed to 15 minutes, we can guarantee the order arrives within that slot.

RENEE: So I could order at 9am and have it delivered by lunchtime.

PETR: Exactly. And critically, the service is always on, those slots are genuinely available for same-day ordering, not just in theory.

RENEE: We experienced that ourselves. I placed an order at 11pm and scheduled it for 7:45-8:00am the next morning, it arrived exactly on time. How many of your deliveries are same-day versus next-day?

PETR: It depends on the day and the market, but roughly 60-70% of the business is same-day. Customers rely on us always being on, and on that accuracy, to keep trusting us with their grocery shopping.

RENEE: I do a lot of online grocery shopping back in Portugal, and often items are missing from my order. With Gurkerl, everything I ordered arrived. How often is that the case, are there substitutions, out-of-stocks?

PETR: Our north star metric is a 95% perfect-order rate, no delay, no missing item, no damaged item, no claims. If you exclude the 15-minute express slots, we're actually at 98%. This is a service customers can truly trust, enabled by the entire tech stack orchestrating the platform.

SHARON: That's great precision, but isn't online grocery still largely a top-up shop, smaller baskets, something you need quickly? Are customers really doing their full weekly shop here?

PETR: They are. Look around the site today, this isn't a top-up shop. We have everything from grills and barbecues to crates of beer, toilet rolls, bakery, a full weekly grocery shop, delivered within that three-hour window. That's what makes us unique.

RENEE: That's the bit that really changes the equation, we're not talking about speed for a handful of items. Even today we shopped the back-to-school section, which had everything from highlighters to notebooks to pencil cases.

SHARON: This fulfilment centre is 9,000 square metres, about a 15-minute drive from Vienna. Can you service all of Vienna from here, and how do you replicate that in less dense markets?

PETR: Our golden metric is one order per square metre per day, so this site's theoretical capacity is 9,000 orders a day. At the moment we're doing 4,000-5,000, and growing quickly. From here we service Vienna and the entire metropolitan area, with the capability to go further out. In the Czech Republic, for example, we run a cross-dock solution delivering from Prague to towns 100-200 kilometres away.

04 · FRESH PRODUCE AND COLD CHAIN LOGISTICS IN ONLINE GROCERY

RENEE: Petr, if you're delivering a full weekly shop, you have to deliver fresh. We saw so much choice and variety here last time, seven varieties of cucumber alone, plus exotic fruit and flowers. How do you offer that level of choice without compromising the speed of the operation?

PETR: That's the secret sauce: all the orchestration managing this fulfilment centre, all the labour across every temperature zone, making sure everything comes together at the right time for the customer, with nothing missing.

SHARON: Fresh is an emotional category, people like to pick their own melon, get the perfect piece of fruit. How do you build trust in fresh with your customers?

PETR: First, by offering everything the customer wants, in the format they're used to, items picked by weight or by piece, whichever they prefer. We can also stock more fruit and veg variety than a typical store, some of the assortment here you'd normally only find at a farmer's market or specialty store, but we house it all under one roof.

RENEE: It doesn't feel like typical online grocery at all, lychees, full ranges of flowers, roses, orchids, and every kind of vegetable.

PETR: If you want customers to use you for their weekly shop, you have to give them that breadth in fresh, it's a category people won't compromise on.

SHARON: How do you manage the cold chain across five different temperature zones without it breaking down?

PETR: Unlike a traditional store, where you shop and put items in your car yourself, we manage the cold chain end to end, multiple temperature zones depending on the product, and active cooling even in the delivery vehicle, so it arrives at your door still cold.

05 · IN-STORE BAKERY AND SAME-DAY FRESHNESS AT 0.5% WASTE

RENEE: Petr, this doesn't need much introduction, you can smell the bakery before you enter it. Gurkerl works with local bakeries but also bakes and finishes products yourselves. Can you explain the model?

PETR: Bakery is a hero category for full-basket shopping. We offer standard bakery lines you'd see in any store, but also hero products from local Viennese bakers, and we bake some products on-site. We take deliveries throughout the day and bake throughout the day too, so nothing you see here is more than a couple of hours old.

SHARON: What percentage of orders include a bakery item?

PETR: Roughly 65%.

RENEE: So many grocers treat bakery as an add-on, but here it's a real point of difference, and that level of freshness signals a wider perception of quality across the whole basket.

SHARON: Fair, but doesn't more choice and more freshness mean more waste? How do you manage that?

PETR: It applies to bakery and fresh produce both, since shelf life is shorter there. Veloq ensures we order the right volume based on forecast demand, and when we're at risk of missing that mark, we actively discount items on the website at a rate that still protects margin. The result is 0.5% shrink as a percentage of gross revenue, against 2-3% for traditional retail stores.

RENEE: One thing I noticed for the first time, there are empty baskets and empty sections on the floor. Is that because they simply haven't been ordered yet today?

PETR: Right, either it hasn't been ordered yet, or it's sold out and being baked right now. We also run a kind of shadow inventory: you can order bread for tomorrow that isn't physically on site yet, because we know we're getting 100 loaves from a given baker, and we offer it to customers before we've even brought it into the building.

06 · AUTOSTORE ROBOTICS AND THE SOFTWARE BEHIND GROCERY AUTOMATION

RENEE: Petr, we're now up on the AutoStore grid, and it's genuinely impressive to watch these robots work. Can you walk us through what we're looking at and where this sits in the picking process?

PETR: What you're seeing is one AutoStore grid, this is our ambient grid, and we have a parallel one for the chilled environment. We store products here for picking: as goods are inbounded, they go into totes and are stored in the grid, then brought down to a picker when ready. We take it a step further by also storing picked orders, as pickers complete an order, it goes back into the grid, buffered until it's ready to go out to the customer.

SHARON: You simply couldn't do this in an ordinary-sized supermarket with this level of SKU choice in this footprint.

PETR: Not at this scale, but we're discussing with partners how to scale this down for a smaller, side-of-store fulfilment model, it can flex up or down with the number of SKUs and stocking days, tailored to each customer.

SHARON: AutoStore itself isn't unique to Veloq, other retailers can buy the same hardware. What does Veloq add that a retailer couldn't build themselves?

PETR: We provide the software overlay that runs the grid and keeps it efficient for same-day grocery. It's modular with our system or others, and that overlay is what makes it hyper-efficient in a same-day environment.

RENEE: So AutoStore is the hardware, and Veloq is the software telling it where to go and what to do.

PETR: Exactly, we're giving the AutoStore tasks based on what needs to be picked and by when, and the pickers execute locally.

RENEE: There's been a lot of automation and robotics investment across retail generally, but grocery in particular hasn't had many automation success stories. What are you doing differently that's worked where others have failed?

PETR: Grocery is genuinely difficult to automate, 18,000 SKUs, all different shapes, sizes and weights, spread across chilled and ambient zones. Where others have failed, we've approached it in a very vertical-specific way, building both the physical design and the software specifically for grocery.

SHARON: You're running one AutoStore grid here, but across Rohlik Group you operate how many?

PETR: Fourteen at the moment, each configured differently, customised per warehouse, per assortment size and per market. It's not one-size-fits-all.

RENEE: The automation goes beyond the grid, we've seen robotic arms picking live customer orders. What's happening there?

PETR: Those arms are pre-picking items for a specific customer order into a single bin, so the picker doesn't have to wait for multiple bins, the order is already consolidated. That's our first step, the next is picking directly into customer bags, which we're working on. We're constantly pushing the boundaries of what's possible in grocery automation.

SHARON: So this isn't a "design it once and you're done" system, you're continuously evolving it.

PETR: Exactly. We have an ongoing roadmap, improving units-per-hour on a monthly basis, and every improvement we make gets transferred to our partners as well.

07 · HUMANS VS. ROBOTS: PICKER PRODUCTIVITY IN GROCERY FULFILMENT

RENEE: We've moved down to the AutoStore picking area, joined by Pablo Cueto Mateos, Fulfilment Centre Manager here in Vienna, who runs this operation day to day. Pablo, thank you for having us back. Can you explain the difference between picking in the AutoStore area versus manual picking elsewhere in the centre?

PABLO: Thank you for being here, it's a pride to host you. It's important to understand that robots are mainly there to boost human productivity, not to replace people. That lets us keep people where they add the most value, checking produce quality, checking that everything matches customer expectations, because our pickers are customers themselves too. Instead of losing time walking the shelves and pushing trolleys, in manual sectors we see productivity of around 100-150 units per hour, while in robotised sectors we reach 500 units per hour, roughly three times higher. We still need our people to fill bags and prepare goods, but they're simply faster thanks to the technology Veloq enables.

RENEE: One challenge with same-day delivery is that demand is unpredictable, one day high, one day low, even with good forecasting. How do you manage staffing against that?

PABLO: It's thanks to the Veloq algorithm that we can react fast enough. Since we promise three-hour delivery from the moment of ordering, we can't manually re-plan staff every half hour, it has to be automated. The system tells us, for example, that we have too many people in one area and need to move people to the chilled sector because demand for cold drinks has spiked due to a temperature rise outside.

RENEE: So you're constantly adapting.

PABLO: Exactly, and we can even automate the message that reassigns people to another area. Everyone is cross-trained, so we can move people to wherever demand is. But when we don't need to react that fast, we keep people where they're already most efficient, the system knows the historical performance of every worker in every sector, so we can optimise who works where for maximum throughput across the building.

SHARON: In terms of figures, what does that translate to in performance and accuracy?

PABLO: We're three times faster in robotised sectors while also lowering the error rate, we're at under 0.5 percentage points error, which ties back to the customer promise: when someone orders from Rohlik Group's Gurkerl here in Vienna, they get exactly what they ordered.

RENEE: And that's key to keeping people coming back, you can't build that trust with a high error rate.

PABLO: Exactly. It's not people or technology, it's both, orchestrated so each does its part and the whole comes together. One boosts the other.

08 · FROM ORDER TO DOORSTEP IN 13 MINUTES: LAST-MILE GROCERY DELIVERY

RENEE: Pablo, this is our last stop. We've seen five temperature zones, robotic arms, the AutoStore grid, bakery, bulky items, a lot happening behind the surface. But the customer promise is three hours from order to delivery. How does it all come together?

PABLO: The first step is route collecting. We pick across seven different areas, so a customer's order might arrive in up to seven separate bags, and we need to bring them together into the van without losing any. We route-collect into three areas by temperature, ambient, chilled and frozen, and the system tells us which route is next to leave, so we prioritise correctly and don't waste resources on an order that isn't due to leave for another two or three hours. Veloq's auto-consolidation also brings together all the bags for the same customer from different areas within the same temperature zone, ready for route collecting, so we can load the vans faster.

RENEE: When I got my order, I could tell which bags came from the cold zone because they were still cold.

PABLO: Exactly, they even have different codes.

SHARON: One of the numbers that stood out to us last time: it takes just 13 minutes from an order being received to leaving the fulfilment centre. How do you operate at that speed without compromising accuracy?

PABLO: The key is that Veloq can automate prioritisation. The moment an express order comes in that's needed within the hour, it skips the queue the system was otherwise keeping people busy with, that order becomes the priority through picking, through route collecting, and onto the fastest departing van.

SHARON: And there's no panic when that happens, it's just business as usual.

PABLO: Exactly. Today is actually a peak day, and you'd never be able to tell.

RENEE: It doesn't stop at the fulfilment centre, you also control the last mile, including driving routes and how orders are grouped. How critical is that to the customer promise?

PABLO: It ensures route prioritisation happens as we described, but also that customers are grouped efficiently into the same vehicle so the driver's route is optimised and normally kept within four hours before returning for another route. That can only be done automatically, no one could manually calculate the hundreds of routes leaving this warehouse every day. The system even waits until the last possible moment in case a neighbour places an order within the hour, so we can group them into the same vehicle.

RENEE: Pablo, does a retailer have to own the last mile themselves to deliver this kind of proposition?

PABLO: It's about owning the process. Who physically makes the delivery matters less than being on time and keeping the promise to the customer, which comes down to the system and how fast you fulfil the order inside the warehouse.

RENEE: When you see it all come together, you realise how much has to happen to produce just one order, as a shopper, you never think about any of that. You just get your order, chilled, complete, on time.

PABLO: It's like a big domino effect: every piece has to follow the precise procedure, or one missing piece means it doesn't happen.

SHARON: Pablo, can you explain just how complex this is to manage within a three-hour same-day window?

PABLO: The standard model for e-grocery used to be next-day, where you could plan on spreadsheets because you knew what customers ordered the day before, time to calculate, time to plan attendance and distribute people. With a three-hour delivery window, demand is unpredictable and changes every hour. You can't rely on manual calculation by one person, it has to be automated. Veloq enables automatic labour planning, moving people across our seven picking sectors in response to demand, whether that's more drink orders because it's hot outside or more dinner-related orders because it's suddenly raining.

RENEE: So the system is constantly planning ahead and reacting.

PABLO: Exactly, re-elaborating and recalculating plans every half hour.

09 · SCALING SAME-DAY GROCERY TECHNOLOGY FOR ANY RETAILER

RENEE: Petr, we're back where we started this morning, and we've learned a lot throughout the day. Everything we've seen was built within Rohlik, but most retailers already have stores, legacy systems, and an existing online operation. What does Veloq look like for them?

PETR: What you've seen today is Veloq working end to end, but the solution itself is modular, the fulfilment centre, the last mile, the router, the software driving the AutoStore, and the website front end. We can apply the solution to each retailer's needs, and it works just as well in a full fulfilment centre as in a side-of-store micro-fulfilment format.

SHARON: Today we're in Vienna, a compact, dense city. How does the model port to less dense cities, say somewhere in the US where it might take over an hour to cross town?

PETR: Our model is fully flexible. Today we've shown what we can achieve at its fastest, in a metropolitan area. In the Czech Republic we cover 90% of the land mass, delivering to small towns and villages far outside the metro area, with a dialled-down proposition, slower delivery, longer windows, that keeps it profitable there. And in some markets, delivery drives the business; in others, like France and parts of the US, store pickup is more popular. Our fulfilment model supports either, including hyper-efficient, same-day, side-of-store fulfilment for store pickup.

SHARON: What's the differentiator for Veloq as a proposition?

PETR: If you want to do same-day grocery efficiently and profitably, we should be who you talk to. Whether you're in a high-labour-cost market that needs automation, or a low-wage market where manual execution works, we can deliver the best proposition for you to grow.

RENEE: Why is same-day so critical for grocers, rather than next-day or quick commerce?

PETR: Because that's what the customer wants, and it's what's driving growth, we see it in our own markets, and in the US with Amazon and Walmart taking share. If you want to grow, that's where the focus needs to be.

RENEE: If the economics are so compelling, why isn't everyone doing this?

PETR: It's genuinely difficult. We're a 12-year-old company, we've built everything ourselves end to end, and we've made plenty of mistakes along the way. What you've seen today is the accumulation of those learnings into a model that works, we're offering other retailers a shortcut through our automation, hardware and know-how. Where retailers often fail is buying generalist systems not built for grocery, or stitching together multiple systems that struggle to talk to each other in a same-day environment. We offer something that works end to end and is modular.

SHARON: For a grocer considering this, how should they think about the investment and the payback period?

PETR: That's very individual, it depends on the market, the size of your e-commerce business, and your commercial strategy. Our recommendation would be tailored to you too. Come talk to us, part of our process is working through that consultatively to build a recommendation that fits your model.

RENEE: And that includes looking at both top-line growth and cost efficiencies together?

PETR: Absolutely, you can't talk about one without the other. I think what differentiates us from other providers is that we can point to our own business: real figures, real growth in our own markets, and have an honest, grounded conversation about how that would apply to you.

SHARON: If a retailer watching this wants to explore what Veloq could do for their business, what's the next step?

PETR: Reach out to us, visit our website, come see the site yourself, bring your team, or set up a consultative call. We're very open to that conversation, so please reach out through our website or LinkedIn and we'll get it started.

SHARON: Thank you so much for hosting us today, Petr, it's been a fantastic experience.

PETR: Thank you for coming.

10 · WHAT GROCERY RETAILERS CAN LEARN FROM ROHLIK AND GURKERL

RENEE: Sharon, what we saw today really challenges a lot of the assumptions most grocers have about same-day delivery, operations and fulfilment. It's been eye-opening.

SHARON: Absolutely. It's a privilege to visit this fulfilment centre again, and it really reminds us that speed doesn't have to mean less choice, there was such an abundance of products there, some really cool finds. But automation isn't the story on its own either, it's how the entire operation works together, all that orchestration, to deliver for the shopper and keep the customer promise.

RENEE: And that's exactly what we came here to see and understand for ourselves.

SHARON: On our very first episode, thanks for joining us on What's In Store, making sense of modern retail.