• by Chuck Martin , April 12, 2019

Grocery retailer Giant Eagle is adding robots to some of its stores to track inventory in real-time.

The pilot program includes robots named Tally from Simbe Robotics, which capture, report and analyze the state and availability of merchandise, sending reports to store teams every 30 minutes.

The robots work during normal store hours alongside shoppers and employees. They traverse the floors multiples time a day, scanning about 35,000 products across the center store grocery and health, care and beauty aisles, according to Giant Eagle.

"When it comes to the food retail industry, shopper experience is everything,” said a Giant Eagle spokesperson. “If a product is unavailable at the time our customer wants to buy it, we’ve missed an opportunity and disappointed our customer. Tally helps address these challenges by providing more precise and timely analysis of the state of in-store merchandise and freeing up staff to focus on customer service and guest interaction.”

Walmart recently announced plans to add thousands of automated assistants to perform in-store functions, including robots that roam aisles and scan items on store shelves.