30 Years of Warehouse Robotics — How Beverage Caught Up
Over the past three decades, robotics has reshaped distribution. From early WMS systems in the 1990s to Amazon’s Kiva robots in 2012, every wave of innovation solved yesterday’s challenges while introducing new ones.
A Quick Look Back
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1990s – WMS & Voice Picking: Digital control reduced errors, but warehouses were still labor-heavy.
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2000s – Conveyors & Shuttle Systems: Boosted speed, but expensive and inflexible.
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2012 – Kiva Robots → Amazon Robotics: Mobile goods-to-person robots revolutionized e-commerce.
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2020 – Symbotic at Walmart: AI-directed pallet automation at national scale.
Beverage Distribution Joins the Race
While retail and grocery adopted early, beverage distribution has historically lagged. That’s why Block One built automation specifically for DSD:
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2012–2016: WMS, vision QA, labelless sortation, and WCS deployments laid the foundation.
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2024: First RoboArm™ installs at Savannah and Clark Distributing; ACR systems live at FEB and Capital City Beverage.
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2025: The Pallet Factory™ goes live at scale — with Savannah, Del Papa, and King Beverage running modular goods-to-robot systems for palletization, case handling, and storage.
The Takeaway
Robotics didn’t happen overnight. It happened wave by wave.
Now, in beverage, AI and software are orchestrating RoboArms™, ASRS, and AMRs inside Block One’s Pallet Factory™ — the first full goods-to-robot stack purpose-built for DSD.
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