• 
• United States
• Ecommerce

Leading sports nutrition retailer The Feed picks 50,000 items each day with Brightpick Autopicker

The Feed, the largest online marketplace for endurance athletes, fully automates its Colorado fulfillment center with 48 Brightpick Autopicker robots, picking 50,000 items each day with just 4 people per shift.

Challenges

The Feed is the largest online marketplace for endurance athletes, offering over 300 brands of high-quality, convenient nutrition options.

Operating from a manual warehouse, the company faced several critical challenges:

• Limited capacity: Despite operating three shifts per day, manual pickers struggled to keep up with the company’s rapid growth. Increasing order volumes led to fulfillment bottlenecks, causing delivery delays and limiting the company’s scalability.
• High throughput demands: Managing over 6,000 SKUs and fulfilling large orders (averaging 10 picks each) for delivery within 24 hours created significant operational complexity. The inconsistency of manual labor often led to inefficiencies and missed deadlines.
• Picking errors: Manual picking was prone to errors, which hurt customer satisfaction and drove up quality control and return costs.
• Rising costs: Labor shortages and high wage inflation squeezed margins and increased operating costs.

“Our returning customer volume alone was at the maximum we could do, so we couldn’t even handle orders for new customers, forcing us to slow our growth until we could move to a new automated fulfillment center.”

Matt Johnson, CEO of The Feed

Solution

The address its operating challenges, The Feed installed 48 Brightpick Autopicker robots in early 2024.

The award-winning Brightpick Autopicker is the only mobile robot in the world that robotically picks and consolidates orders directly in the warehouse aisles, like a human with a cart. Brightpick Autopicker is powered by proprietary 3D machine vision and AI algorithms, which have been trained on more than a billion picks to date and use machine learning to improve with each pick.

The installation also includes two Goods-to-Person stations for heavy or hard-to-pick items. Robots automatically transport those items to the stations, where humans complete the picks. Each station can support up to 350 order lines per hour.

In addition, The Feed’s setup features two pallet picking stations, where workers pick directly from cases or pallets and place those items onto the order totes carried by the Brightpick Autopickers.

Beyond picking orders, Brightpick robots also autonomously buffer picked orders inside the system and replenish new inventory, streamlining The Feed’s entire operation.

“Our goal is to fulfill every order within minutes of it coming in. We finally have the technology that enables us to do that while sustaining strong growth.”

Matt Johnson, CEO of The Feed

The Feed purchased the Brightpick solution through robots-as-a-service (RaaS) pricing, which resulted in minimal upfront investment and immediate ROI and cost savings. Brightpick completed the installation just three months after receiving the purchase order, including one month for on-site installation.

Brightpick Autopickers work with standard shelving and totes, requiring no fixed infrastructure like conveyors or safety fencing. The robots navigate autonomously using advanced LiDAR sensors and AI, eliminating the need for floor-based guidance systems such as QR codes or magnetic tape. This not only speeds up installation but also simplifies maintenance and enhances reliability.

Results

After implementing Brightpick Autopicker, The Feed boosted its throughput to 50,000 picks per day while reducing labor to just 3-4 people per shift.

“We were able to go from 50-100 people to completely automated with the Brightpick solution. The payback period from Brightpick was immediate; we were cash flow positive within 60 days.”

Matt Johnson, CEO of The Feed

The Feed realized multiple benefits from Brightpick:

• Significant labor savings: 80% reduction in labor for picking and replenishment, decreasing from 30 people per shift to just six (two managing G2P stations, two handling pallet picking, and two for decanting).
• Higher throughput: Throughput rose to 2,000 picks per hour and 50,000 picks per day, significantly enhancing operational efficiency.
• Increased picking accuracy: Brightpick Autopickers virtually eliminated picking errors, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and fewer returns.
• Scalability and flexibility: The Feed can now effortlessly scale operations by adding more robots and shelving, without increased labor costs.

Following the success of the initial installation, The Feed plans to expand the automated system further in 2025.

“Brightpick was the perfect combination: it delivered density, speed, and allowed us to drive picking costs down through full automation.”

Matt Johnson, CEO of The Feed

About Brightpick
Brightpick offers AI robots for warehouses to easily automate every step of their order fulfillment. The innovative robots enable warehouses of any size to fully automate order picking, consolidation, dispatch and stock replenishment. The multiple award-winning Brightpick solution takes weeks to deploy and enables companies to reduce their picking labor by 98% and cut picking costs by half. Headquartered near Cincinnati, OH, Brightpick has more than 200 employees and is part of Photoneo Brightpick Group, which has over 8000 technology installations across the US, Europe and Asia. For more information, contact us here.