On the 7th, Lotte Mart’s “Zeta Smart Center Busan” in Gangseo-gu, Busan was visited. In a refrigerated storage room at 5 degrees Celsius, robots resembling tool carts dashed along grid-shaped rails at 4 meters per second, accompanied by a sound like a vacuum cleaner in operation. Each robot, about the size of a small refrigerator and weighing around 50 kg, is a “bot” that transports totes (baskets) containing products. When a customer order is received, the bot communicates with the central control system 10 times per second, locates and retrieves the required tote, and then moves it to the “picking robot arm.”

After the robot arm selects the ordered products and places them in a delivery tote, they go through packing and are then moved to a zone where the appropriate temperature for each product is maintained before being loaded onto delivery vehicles. The time from order receipt to delivery readiness is 30 minutes. The goods loaded in this way are delivered at the customer’s requested time in 2- to 3-hour slots. Cha Woo-cheol, CEO of Lotte Mart & Super, explained, “It is a system that applies a cold chain from start to finish to provide fresh food at the right time with perfect quality.”

Lotte Mart officially launched its push into the online grocery market by starting operations at Zeta Smart Center Busan on this day. The company aims to extend to online channels the competitiveness it has built around offline stores by combining its fresh food sourcing capabilities accumulated over 30 years with automation technology from British retail tech company Ocado.

Unveiled for the first time that day, Zeta Smart Center Busan is a customer fulfillment center responsible for online orders from 4 million households in Busan and the Yeongnam region. Construction began in December 2023, with an investment of about KRW 200 billion. The total floor area is 40,000 square meters, roughly the size of six football fields. The center handles up to 35,000 products, including around 10,000 refrigerated and frozen food items.

Ocado’s integrated solution (OPS) has been applied for the first time in Korea to the overall operation of the center. Based on OPS’s artificial intelligence (AI), the entire process from demand forecasting and ordering to picking and shipping has been automated. Up to 1,000 AI robots can be deployed, enabling the processing of up to 33,000 orders per day.

In the online grocery market, Lotte Mart cites its fresh food sourcing capability as a key competitive strength. Lotte Mart procures fruits, vegetables, and meat directly from production areas nationwide and has managed quality by sorting and processing products at its in-house Fresh Food Quality Innovation Center, which has been in operation since 2018.

The company has also reinforced its cold chain to maintain the quality of sourced fresh food through to delivery. It uses an “end-to-end” system that keeps products at the appropriate temperature from inbound to outbound. In particular, in the freezing zone at minus 25 degrees Celsius, it has introduced an “auto freezer” system—first among Ocado partners—where bots move products without human workers. Temperature control continues throughout the delivery process. Delivery vehicles are equipped with their own cooling systems, and refrigerated and frozen products are packed in dedicated packaging that can maintain proper temperatures for more than six hours even in heat waves above 30 degrees Celsius. Jung Jae-woo, head of Lotte Mart’s Online Business Division, said, “Customers will be able to receive ice cream rock-solid frozen even in extreme heat.”

Lotte Mart plans to invest a total of KRW 1 trillion by 2030 to build Zeta Smart Centers at six locations nationwide, including Goyang in Gyeonggi Province. CEO Cha said, “Zeta Smart Center, a next-generation online logistics center that combines Lotte Mart’s fresh food expertise with Ocado’s AI robotic logistics technology from the UK, will change the paradigm of the domestic online grocery market.”

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