The machine knew before anyone else that something had gone awry.
A case of juice fell over during a routine stacking procedure at Metro’s new, automated warehouse in Etobicoke — part of the grocery giant’s almost $1-billion investment in modernizing the way it moves food around Ontario and Quebec.
Almost immediately, the sophisticated stacking machine started flashing, first a white light, then a more urgent red.
“It realizes there’s a problem,” said Mario Duran, Metro’s director of logistics and engineering, in the middle of giving a media tour of the new facility on Monday.
He didn’t seem nervous. He had faith in the machine — known officially as a COM, or case order machine, one of several that make up the ‘heart’ of the entire automated operation here.
Metro is banking that this automated distribution centre for fresh produce, meat, dairy and flowers — the final piece of a years-long overhaul — will get more product to stores faster and more efficiently, leading to fewer empty shelves.
In Etobicoke, if a pallet of juice comes in from a supplier, the automated system can break down that pallet into individual cases of juice.
If a Metro store anywhere in Ontario orders two cases of that juice, it’s the COM’s job to grab the cases and pack them onto a new pallet with the rest of the products the store ordered — a few cases of deli meats, five cases of yogurt, and so on.
The 14 COMs are responsible for figuring out the best way to pack that order onto a pallet. So the COMs are effectively the most brilliant Tetris player ever created, as another Metro executive, Yanick Blanchet, put it on Monday.
The machines can look at a store’s order for dozens of different-sized cases of different product and design that order into a perfect cube. No wasted space, no jagged edges. It can even group the cases of products together, based on their what section of the store they are destined for, to make for easier unloading.
But the best part about this machine, Duran said, is how gentle it is.
“Look at the way it touches the product,” he said, watching as the COM’s metal teeth rose up to caress a case of cold cuts and guide it onto a pallet.
When the juice fell on its side on Monday, throwing off the COM’s cube design, the boxes kept coming, making the cube more and more imperfect until the machine paused automatically.
Within a minute or so, an employee with Witron, the German firm that built the system, arrived to right-side the juice. (Witron employees are easy to spot, because their coats are a different colour, but also because they are not authorized to drive any of the equipment, so they get around the 567,000-square-foot facility by riding bright yellow tricycles.)
The new distribution centre is Metro’s largest in the country and the final phase in its seven-year modernization project which involved building or expanding four distribution centres near Montreal, Quebec City and Toronto.
The fresh distribution centre in Etobicoke, along with another nearby facility specializing in frozen product that opened in 2022, cost Metro $510 million. But it represents a major upgrade on the 1950s warehouse on the same site that Metro inherited when it took over A&P in 2005.
“If you saw where we came from — we’re, like, in awe,” Duran, who started working with A&P in 1990, said on Monday, raising his hands up toward the 100-foot ceilings.
The new fresh warehouse, which started full operations last week, includes 25 banana-gassing rooms where thousands of cases of bananas can be treated with ethylene gas to ripen them. The amount of gas varies depending on the where the bananas are headed, Duran said. For example, bananas going to Thunder Bay get less, so they don’t overripen on the journey and show up at the store with brown spots.
The warehouse is capable of processing 1.1 million cases of fresh product a week and will serve 277 stores in Ontario, including Metro’s Food Basics chain.
Standing at the top of a staircase near the roof, Duran said he felt proud looking at it all, the way you would feel about one of your children. To an outsider, it can feel jarring. It’s a world designed totally for machines, all steel and aluminum and right angles, kept very cold, without any sign of natural life, expect for the odd, uncovered shipment of oranges or a technician bundled in a heavy coat.
“To me,” Duran said. “this is a masterpiece.”
