Piece-picking robot cells for chilled and frozen grocery distribution centres in Japan
Japan's grocery distribution centres pick thousands of chilled and frozen items a night for convenience stores, in rooms kept at 5°C or −20°C where shifts are hard to staff. Many sites now run 30% below planned headcount, and existing picking robots struggle with frosted packaging, shrink-wrapped multipacks and bags that change shape when grasped.
Kumiko's cells combine a cold-rated arm, a hybrid suction and soft-finger gripper, and vision models trained on more than 40,000 Japanese grocery SKUs, including frosted and reflective packs. A cell picks from totes into store-bound crates at up to 900 items an hour, asks a remote operator for help on uncertain grasps, and learns new SKUs from about five photos.
Food and grocery distributors in Japan and South Korea run roughly 2,500 temperature-controlled centres, each a candidate for 4 to 20 cells as labour costs rise.
Robots-as-a-service at ¥1.5M per cell per month on three-year contracts, covering hardware, maintenance and remote assistance, plus a one-time integration fee per site.
Haruka MoriCEO and co-founder
Kenta IshikawaCTO and co-founder
Takeshi FujimotoVP Operations
Yui NakagawaHead of PerceptionTeaching a new SKU from about five photos is what makes this viable with the weekly packaging churn of Japanese convenience-store products. The perception team was open about where it fails: deformable pillow bags still need more examples. The Korean pilots will be the real test of how well the models transfer to different packaging.
We had tried two other picking systems in our frozen zone and both stalled on frosted labels and bags. Kumiko's cells have run our night shift for five months at around 850 picks an hour. Integration with our warehouse system took longer than promised, about ten weeks rather than six.
Reply from Haruka Mori, CEO
Sorry about the integration delay, Tomás. An integration engineer now joins on site from week one, which has cut new-site timelines to six to seven weeks.
The technology is impressive, but at ¥1.5M per cell per month plus an integration fee, payback only works for centres running dense night shifts. Smaller regional depots I spoke with could not make the numbers work. A cheaper cell or shorter contract option would widen the market considerably.
Reply from Haruka Mori, CEO
A two-shift pricing model for smaller depots and a 12-month starter contract are both in testing; first results in Q1.
Cold-chain piece picking is a hard robotics problem and this team has 46 cells doing it every night. Gross margin per cell nearly doubled as the assist rate fell, which is the metric that matters for robots-as-a-service. Haruka and Takeshi combine research depth with real warehouse operations experience.
Coming soon. Testimonials are invited by the founder and shown separately from open reviews.
Coming soon. Follow Kumiko Robotics to hear about product and funding updates when this launches.
