The world's first self-driving store.
Groceries are soon to be a $1 trillion business worldwide, and perishables like fresh produce make up around 60% of all groceries sold, however according to Kantar Worldpanel just a tiny fraction of that - less than 5% - has moved online. This is because having humans pick and deliver groceries is prohibitively expensive for retailers, and because consumers don't trust someone else picking produce for them. So we're building a fleet of on-demand, self-driving stores that we'll license to retailers to power the most affordable on-demand delivery services across the world.
Consumers will simply tap a button to request the closest robomart. Once it arrives, they head outside, unlock the doors, and shop for the products they want. When they are done, they just close the doors and send it on its way. Robomart tracks what customers have taken using patent pending "grab and go" checkout free technology and will charge them and send a receipt accordingly.
We conducted extensive research and surveyed women between 26-44 in the US and found that more than 85% of them do not shop for fruits and vegetables online, because they felt home delivery is too expensive and that they wanted to pick their own produce. Almost 65% said they would order a robomart more than once a week.
We have built our first prototype at our contract manufacturer's facility in California and have started work on our fully functional Robomarts which we aim to deploy in commercial pilots soon. We have also partnered with the leading wireless EV charging station provider and will offer their wireless charging stations as part of our offering. Retailers can sponsor these pilots and test our autonomous store proposition with their customers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Retailers would have access to our state-of-the-art autonomous fleet management system that manages orders, routing, restocking and teleoperations. Although this system will be automated, they would have the ability to manually communicate with customers, store staff and law enforcement via teleoperations if required, and access real time sales data and analytics.