Ocado’s robots move into the freezer at AEON’s new Tokyo warehouse

Ocado Group and AEON announced the go-live of their second customer fulfillment center (CFC) in Japan on 22 October. The four-story site in Hachioji City, Tokyo, has a gross floor area of about 40,000 m² and serves Green Beans, AEON’s online grocery brand, across the Tokyo region.

The site carries Ocado’s full set of Re:Imagined technologies, including On-Grid Robotic Pick. Ocado’s performance figures for the site are all for the freezer. Hachioji is the second Ocado site to run the Auto-Freezer, which sends a specialized version of the company’s fulfillment bot into the freezer. The first was Lotte’s CFC in Busan, South Korea, which opened in August. Ocado said at that launch that the Auto-Freezer brings its ‘hive and bot’ automation into temperatures as low as -25°C.

Ocado says frozen orders are processed 2.7 times faster than at AEON’s first CFC, in Chiba, which opened in July 2023. Freezer inventory capacity rises by 150%, and the storage footprint the freezer needs falls by 50%. These are the company’s own numbers for a site that has only just opened, and Ocado has not published the number of robots at Hachioji or what the building cost.

The Hachioji figures make a narrow case for warehouse robots: that automation earns its keep first in the freezer, which Ocado calls “one of the least hospitable warehouse environments”, and where every square meter of storage has to be chilled. Cold, labor and floor space are the same constraints in any frozen-goods warehouse, grocery or not.

What the freezer figures show

At Hachioji a specialized bot processes the frozen orders, and Ocado says staff time in freezer conditions falls below 5% of working hours. Ocado has not said which tasks still take staff into the freezer.

A freezer that holds 150% more stock in half the space changes the size of building an operator needs, and the energy it takes to keep that space cold. Ocado has not published energy figures for Hachioji, so that saving is not yet on the record.

Nick de la Vega, chief revenue officer of Ocado Group, put the weight on the freezer. “This is one of our most advanced sites in the world, with the implementation of our Auto-Freezer technology in particular set to drive significant efficiency and capacity benefits, as well as improving working conditions for colleagues,” he said.

A partner that keeps building

AEON is one of the partners still adding capacity. The two companies agreed in 2019 to build AEON NEXT’s online grocery business on the Ocado Smart Platform. AEON NEXT revealed the Green Beans brand in April 2023, and the Chiba CFC followed that July. Ocado says Green Beans has grown 70% year on year, with a perfect order rate of 97%. Hachioji also offers a ‘Pickup’ service, with orders ready to collect from the site in as little as three hours.

“We are pleased to build on our successful partnership with AEON with the opening of our second CFC in Japan,” de la Vega said.

The partners that stepped back

The opening lands in an uneven year for the Hatfield-based group. Ocado’s half-year results on 16 July showed revenue up 54% to £1,037m, but only 1% higher, at £684m, once the effect of Kroger and Sobeys closures was taken out. Kroger said in 2025 that it was closing three Ocado-powered CFCs, in Frederick, Maryland, Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin and Groveland, Florida, and Sobeys decided in January to close one of its three, as AJ Bell set out in its report on the results. Ocado’s underlying cash outflow, excluding closure impacts, widened to £147m from £108m a year earlier.

Tim Steiner, Ocado’s chief executive, held to his target at the results: “we will achieve positive cash flow in the second half of the year and be full-year cash flow positive in FY27.” At the half year, Ocado had 23 CFCs worldwide, international CFC volumes were up 27% and On-Grid Robotic Pick was live in 14 CFCs.

Ocado also has more room to sell than it did a year ago. In December 2025 it ended mutual exclusivity with retailers in most of the markets where its technology is live, including with Kroger in the US. Steiner said then that Ocado would bring “the full range of Ocado’s AI-powered and robotic solutions back to multiple markets.”

What changes after Hachioji

AEON is adding a CFC while Kroger and Sobeys close some of theirs, and its Green Beans brand grew 70% in a year. The freezer figures behind that expansion are Ocado’s own, from a site in its first days, with no robot count, building cost or energy data published alongside them. Until they are, the case for robots in the freezer at Hachioji rests on the vendor’s launch numbers.