Walmart has broken ground on a high-tech distribution center slated for a Fall 2020 opening.
Shafter, California, will be the home of the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retail giant’s first high-tech DC for fresh and frozen groceries.
The facility will feature forward-looking technology, including Witron technology, to process grocery perishables – produce, eggs, dairy, flowers and frozen goods. Here’s what else you need to know.
The new DC is expected to move 40 percent more product than a traditional DC. Rather than manually stacking boxes and building pallets, the new facility will allow associates to use new technology to do the heavy lifting.
“Every product is measured and documented so that we know how to handle it,” says Shayne Wahlmeier, one of the engineers on the project. “A computer algorithm shows all the cases ordered for a given store and determines how to palletize them to maximize the space on a pallet or trailer. It also takes into account density – what’s crushable, what’s not.”