Hotel, Restaurant, and Café (HoReCa)

Warehouse Automation for Food Wholesale Distribution

Keep up with complex delivery routes, extended peak seasons, and tight labor markets across Food Wholesale Distribution with flexible warehouse automation from Locus Robotics. Our robotic solutions streamline store-ready, route-sequenced pallet building, speed up picking, reduce manual handling, and protect accuracy from pick to dock — without expanding your footprint.

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Food Wholesale Distribution is Difficult. Here’s How You Stay Fast

Food service and hospitality distribution face rising SKU complexity, volatile order volumes, and tight delivery windows. HoReCa operators must assemble multi-temperature, multi-category orders quickly and accurately in space-constrained environments where labor is already stretched thin.

Flexibility-First Automation built for Hotel, Restaurant & Café distribution gives operators a way to stay fast, consistent, and safe — even through long seasonal peaks.

View the DHL Makro Case Study

Flexibility to adapt to demand without disruption

Higher Throughput

Hit tight dispatch windows without growing headcount or footprint. Locus Robotics solutions move totes and support in process store pallet building, so orders clear faster every shift.

Keep Pickers in the Zone

Associates stay in their zones while robots handle walking, routing, and store-pallet delivery to reduce fatigue and lift overall output.

Lower Cost per Store Load

Fewer touches. Fewer errors. More accurate pallets. LocusONE™ provides real-time visibility to reduce operational costs and improve downstream flow.

Flexibility to adapt to demand without disruption

Smarter Store-Pallet Building

Multi-dropoff routing delivers totes directly to the correct store pallet — eliminating a manual end-of-process sortation step, reducing congestion, and accelerating pallet completion.

Go Live in Weeks

Ideal for brownfield and greenfield sites, including compact foodservice warehouses. Go live in weeks, without construction or operational downtime.

Flexible Capacity with RaaS

Scale robot fleets for long peak seasons and return them when demand normalizes. Makro Spain supported a 7 month peak season with 95 permanent and 28 seasonal robots, without locking into fixed infrastructure or long depreciation cycles.

Built for Tight, Busy DCs

Robots navigate the same environments as associates, even in aisles shared with forklifts. LocusONE™ optimizes missions and manages multi-robot traffic using Locus Applied AI, trained on a decade of real-world operations data, helping teams avoid bottlenecks and keep dispatch on track.

Built for the Realities of HoReCa (Hotel, Restaurant and Cafe) Distribution

End-to-End HoReCa Workflows

Locus Origin and Locus Vector handle movements from totes to cases to cartons across inbound, outbound, replenishment, consolidation, and store-ready pallet build — without changing your layout.

Customizable Handling

Supports totes, boxes, coolers, and multi-temperature items. Easily adapts to batch or discrete picking depending on order flow.

People Pick. Robots Move.

By separating picking from transport, the team completes more work with less strain, ideal for fast-turn HoReCa environments.

Accuracy from Pick to Dock

Multi-dropoff routing and real-time orchestration improve pallet accuracy and reduce touches that typically introduce errors and rework.

Everything You Need to Run Food Wholesale Fulfillment at Scale

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

Reporting & Insights

Accuracy & Condition

Partner with a provider that has your back

Onboard scanning improves accuracy
Intuitive interface supports dozens of languages
Train new associates quickly

Use real-time data to anticipate the unexpected

Real-time metrics on productivity, throughput, and pallet accuracy
Visibility that helps reduce bottlenecks and guide labor planning
Continuous optimization and performance tuning as your routes, volume, and labor mix change

Deliver the right products to the right customers in the right condition

Supports the full range of HoReCa packaging types
Integrated task interleaving for pick-to-pallet, restock, and replenishment
Safe and efficient in people-dense environments
Multi-dropoff routing delivers totes to the correct pallet with fewer touches, removing a manual sortation step used in traditional workflows

Real Results for Food Wholesale Operations

Stay Ahead of Seasonality

Scale robot fleets for long peak seasons and return them when demand normalizes.

Safer, Easier, More Productive Workflows

Locus keeps pickers in zone by taking over transport, reducing unproductive walking and lowering fatigue in high-pressure environments. Operators report stronger ergonomics, more predictable shifts, and increased retention. Makro achieved zero safety incidents even as robots navigated shared aisles with forklifts and people.

Reach ROI Faster Than Ever

With successful deployments across foodservice and HoReCa distribution, Locus Robotics helps operators achieve rapid ROI, often without expanding their footprint. Our team evaluates your workflows and designs a solution built for your throughput, routes, and growth goals.

Featured Resources

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Warehouse Automation for Food Wholesale Distribution

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Food Wholesale Distribution is Difficult. Here’s How You Stay Fast