Ocado Group and grocery retailer Lotte Shopping have launched their first automated customer fulfilment centre (CFC) in South Korea, introducing a number of Ocado technologies for the first time.
The Busan facility will serve a catchment of around four million households across the city and wider Yeongnam region, supporting Lotte’s expansion in South Korea’s rapidly growing online grocery market.
The launch follows a partnership signed between the two companies in 2022. Lotte began using the Ocado Smart Platform in 2025, initially fulfilling online orders using Ocado’s in-store fulfilment software.
The new CFC introduces Ocado’s fully automated freezer, known as Auto-Freezer, which extends the company’s ‘hive and bot’ automation into environments operating at temperatures as low as -25°C. Ocado expects the system to deliver more than twice the productivity of a traditional manual freezer operation.
The facility will also support ‘dawn delivery’, allowing freshly packed grocery orders to reach customers before 7am – an important feature of South Korea’s e-commerce grocery market.
Ocado said the site is expected to be its most environmentally efficient CFC globally. It will support a 100% electric vehicle fleet for daytime deliveries and use more energy-efficient 3D-printed robots and multi-temperature totes to maximise delivery storage density. Lotte is also expected to install solar panels to reduce annual carbon emissions by more than 1,000 tonnes.
Nick De La Vega, chief revenue officer at Ocado Group, said: “This is another major milestone for Ocado as we launch one of our most advanced CFCs to date in one of the world’s leading markets for grocery e-commerce.”
Cha Woo Chul, chief executive of Lotte Mart & Super, added: “By delivering farm-fresh produce on schedule to 4 million households in the Yeongnam region, we will reshape the paradigm of domestic online grocery shopping.”
Online penetration represents some 28% of total grocery retail sales in South Korea, significantly higher than the majority of major grocery markets worldwide, with sales reaching KRW 52.3 trillion in 2025, (c. £26.5bn) according to Statistics Korea.
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