RedMart turns 10 with opening of $100m warehouse

From two men in a van when it first started in 2011, to stocking over 5,000 products in 2015, Singapore's leading online grocery story RedMart has grown significantly in the last few years and now stocks up on over 100,000 items for households across the country.

And in celebration of 10 years of operations, the local company, which is owned by Lazada, has unveiled its new $100 million, 350,000 sq ft West Fulfillment Centre (WFC).

The fulfilment centre is to cater to the rising demand for grocery deliverables in the country.

With state of the art advanced automated systems, groceries will not only reach customers fresher than before, they would also arrive cleaner and safer as less human contact is required in the new workflow — a particularly important factor to note during pandemic times.

At the WFC, the advanced automated Goods To Person Picking storage and retrieval system helps to sort, store and retrieve over 48,000 products.

The system also helps to coordinate and fulfil orders on a daily basis and can be easily managed by six RedMart staff instead of the dozens required to do the same work manually.

The Pick To Light system, on the other hand, automates the selection and sorting of frozen, cold and fresh produce. The system fulfils tens of thousands of orders efficiently, reducing human error and physical contact.

RedMart is committed to reducing food waste and with the brand new distribution facility, they can do just that.

The use of machine learning significantly reduces touchpoints between humans and products before they reach the customer, hence allowing groceries to remain fresh and consumable.

That said, the larger facility allows more orders to be filled while reducing human error and maintaining the same manpower headcount as before as workers are still required to supervise the automated machines.

Even as the business has expanded to include over 900 employees, 800 retailers and of course, this new that is four times larger than their previous facility, the bigger news is how the business has reshaped the food we consume, from importing top favourites from around the world, to introducing new items under it's Private Label house brand.

Starting with three items six years ago, RedMart's housebrand now carries over 400 products covering 13 of the 15 key categories on RedMart, of which more than 50 per cent of these items are produced with local partners and suppliers.

Our top favourites include their dips and spreads, including their amazing tomato salsa, their selection of ready-to-eat meals such as chicken korma, and their premium fishballs, which are not regular ones, but those from Singapore's very own Michelin Bib Gourmand winner, Fishball Story.

Currently, the top-selling imported products available on RedMart include Picard 8 Pure Butter Traditional French Croissants and Monoprix Gourmet Premium Comte Cheese from France, Woolworths Shine 10-in-1 Dishwater Tablets from Australia, Sainsbury's House Pinot Grigio from the United Kingdom and more.

This article was first published in Geek Culture.