Aeon Next brings a second Tokyo fulfilment centre online, now automating its frozen aisle

AEON Next Co., Ltd., which runs Japan's online-only supermarket Green Beans on fulfilment technology licensed from the UK's Ocado Group, said its second customer fulfilment centre (CFC) began full operation on October 22 in Hachioji, on Tokyo's western edge. The four-storey, steel-framed building sits on a roughly 54,000-square-metre site, with about 40,000 square metres of total floor space, and follows the company's first centre, in Chiba city, which opened in July 2023, AEON Next said.

The new site's frozen-goods area runs on AutoFreezer, an Ocado automated storage-and-picking system AEON Next is using for the first time, extending to frozen goods the robotics it already runs in the chilled and ambient-temperature sections of its Chiba centre. The company also said it is expanding the number of automated pick-and-pack and loading robots it first installed in Chiba last year by up to three times at the Hachioji site, while the chilled area there now uses autonomous transport robots from LexxPluss to move product carts.

On the company's own figures, automating the frozen area is expected to let Hachioji process roughly 2.7 times as much inbound and outbound stock as the equivalent operation at Chiba, while a grid-based high-density storage system is meant to cut the floor area needed to store frozen goods by about half and let the centre hold around 1.5 times more inventory, widening the frozen range it can offer. AEON Next said the same automation should also cut the time staff spend working inside the frozen area to under 5% of the comparable figure at Chiba, and that it expects productivity across the whole site to run at roughly 115% of the Chiba centre's level.

Running two fulfilment centres instead of one is meant to shorten delivery routes and broaden the area Green Beans can reliably serve, AEON Next said. Alongside the automation, the company is adding ways for customers to interact with the site directly: from October 22, shoppers can collect online orders within as little as three hours at a new pickup counter inside the centre's Green Beans Park facility, for a minimum order of ¥3,000 before tax and no collection fee; from mid-November it plans members-only tours, with free visits to an exhibition space twice a week and paid tours into the working centre once or twice a month. The centre will also stock locally made Hachioji products such as tofu and confectionery, the company said.

Online grocery in Japan has mostly stayed a loss-leading add-on to a physical supermarket chain rather than a stand-alone business, because the cost of picking, packing and delivering small, mixed-temperature baskets is hard to make work without heavy automation. Building Green Beans on Ocado's purpose-built fulfilment technology from the outset, rather than retrofitting an existing warehouse, is why AEON Next can point to concrete efficiency numbers -- a near-tripling of frozen throughput, half the storage footprint -- instead of a vaguer promise to improve service. Whether a second automated centre actually grows Green Beans' customer base, rather than just serving the same one more efficiently, is something that will show up in Green Beans' own numbers, not its robots, the next time Aeon reports.