Symbotic declined to make the 71-year-old CEO available for an interview. But Cohen has laid out big plans for the companys future in speeches and on calls with analysts.
The vision for Symbotic is to be the best automation company in the world, Cohen said at an investor event in May, where he spoke of moving every box in every warehouse. I cant think of any other vision that suits how big an opportunity this is.
If Symbotic stays at the head of the warehouse automation pack now a $20-billion-a-year industry it will be Cohens second major triumph.
He joined his familys business, C&S Wholesale Grocers, in the 1970s, back when the Keene, N.H.-based company was doing $50 million a year of sales around New England. In 1989, he took over as CEO from his father, Lester, who had taken over for his father and company cofounder Israel Cohen in 1955.
Rick Cohen expanded C&S through acquisitions and built it into the countrys largest grocery wholesaler, a business that sits between supermarket chains and manufacturers like General Mills and Procter & Gamble. With sales of almost $35 billion last year, it ranked as the eighth largest private company in the United States by revenue, according to Forbes (three spots ahead of Fidelity Investments).
Supplying groceries taught Cohen about logistics and automation and opened doors to large retailers, including Walmart, which has been a C&S customer. And in the 1990s, C&S built one of the countrys most advanced automated warehouses in York, Pa.
Cohen was buying automation technology from companies Symbotic would later compete against, analyst Rob Mason at RW Baird said. He understands where the shortcomings reside and hes led Symbotic to design a superior automation solution, Mason said.
Around 2005, an inventor named John Lert reached out to Cohen about starting an automation company for grocery stores. Cohen provided financing to form the startup in 2007, but only Lert was listed on its early corporate filings in Massachusetts as a manager and on its first patents as the inventor.
Initially called CasePick Systems, the startup focused on packing and unpacking pallets of boxes at distribution warehouses. But after having trouble raising money amid the financial crisis, Lert sold his majority stake to Cohen in 2009. He left the company in 2011, just as its first prototype system was installed at a C&S warehouse in Newburgh, N.Y.
We had a complex relationship, Lert said of Cohen in an interview. Im very happy for his success and proud of the work we did.
In 2012, Cohen changed the companys name to Symbotic, reflecting the close relationship the robots would have with a warehouses operations. But perfecting the system wasnt easy, and Cohen had sharp elbows. Though he was the chairman, not the CEO, Cohen involved himself in everything from hiring to product design to sales, some of his former employees said.
He made every decision, whether it was a $100 million decision or $100 decision, and so you just had to know that things were going through him, said Ron Kyslinger, a robotics industry consultant who worked for Cohen at C&S and Symbotic from 2013 to 2015, and later worked for Walmart and Amazon.
Cohen recruited Kyslinger himself, first taking the consultant to visit C&Ss York warehouse, then flying on a private jet to Newburgh to see Symbotics pilot project. Quite frankly, they had a science project, it was very clunky, Kyslinger recalled.
Not everyone thrived at Symbotic. The company went through three CEOs from 2011 until the end of 2017, when Cohen formally stepped in to head the firm, resigning as CEO of C&S, where he remained executive chairman.
In 2022, Cohen again tried to hire an outside CEO. But Michael Loparco, a longtime executive at electronics assembler Jabil, lasted only eight months before resigning in November 2022. (Loparco did not return a call for comment.)
The goal of Symbotics system is to help retailers keep store shelves stocked. Each system takes in pallets of goods on trucks from suppliers, sorts and stashes individual cases of items in a warehouse, and then assembles pallets of assorted cases for shipment to retail store locations as needed. Thats different from the robots at Amazon, which bought North Reading-based Kiva Systems in 2012 to automate the movement of e-commerce orders within its warehouses.
A shampoo maker might send a truck full of cases to a Walmart warehouse, where the Symbotic system stashes the boxes. Then when a particular Walmart store needs more shampoo, Symbotic retrieves some cases and assembles them on a pallet for shipment to the store. The system can mix and match various items on one pallet and even optimize the placement to make stocking shelves in a specific store quicker.
Symbotics technology goes far beyond rivals that try to integrate robots among human package handlers. Its robots-only system is built on a massive 30-foot-high steel frame, typically with 10 levels, for storing goods. Aisles crisscross each level where the flat-topped, round symbots whiz goods around at 25 miles per hour. Built-in lifts move goods from level to level.
An AI controller system gives the robots orders and determines where to store items. Similar items are not grouped together. Instead, Symbotics system works more like a computer hard drive, with similar items scattered all over so they can be retrieved quickly.
A single installation can cost more than $50 million and be the size of a football field or larger. But big customers can save money on labor and warehouse space, while improving speed and efficiency.
Automation has caused job losses in the economy in recent decades, while also improving productivity and leading to new jobs, studies have found. The warehouse jobs replaced by Symbotic and its rivals are particularly demanding, Kyslinger noted. A lot of people manually slugging cases its not a great environment, he said. Automating it makes a heck of a lot of sense.
Rick Cohens big break was getting Walmart to sign on in 2021 to install Symbotic systems in 25 of its regional distribution centers. The retail giant had been testing the technology at one of its Florida distribution centers for more than three years and watched it slowly improve. In 2022, Walmart upped the plan to include all 42 of its centers.
Cohen has said that supplying groceries to Walmart helped land the retail giant as a customer for Symbotic. They remembered me, Cohen said in a 2021 Forbes interview. Its a very small world.
As part of the deal, Walmart got a stake in Symbotic and owned 11 percent of the companys shares as of January 2023. Walmart also can have an observer at board meetings and has the right to match outside investment offers, according to Symbotics annual report.
Walmart vice president Mike Walden said in an email that his company has watched Symbotic grow from a start-up with promising technology to a leader in robotics. . . . Weve solved some of the most difficult challenges in warehouse automation together and look forward to the continued innovation.
Last year was a coming-out party of sorts for Symbotic, after it went public by merging with a blank-check company in 2022. The company held its first investor day in May, taking shareholders and analysts on a tour of a Walmart warehouse in Brooksville, Fla. And in July, Symbotic partnered with Japanese tech and investing giant SoftBank to create a new business called GreenBox that will own and operate fully automated warehouses for smaller customers.
Revenue doubled in the companys just-completed fiscal year to $1.1 billion. (Almost 90 percent of Symbotics revenue came from Walmart.) And Symbotics 330 percent stock gain in 2023 is tops among local tech firms, handily beating second-place finisher DraftKings, which was up 209 percent, and HubSpot, up 101 percent.
Still, Symbotic has only installed 12 fully operating systems in warehouses, with another 35 in development, as of the end of September. Symbotic said it has a backlog of $23 billion of systems on order. Customers pay for installation plus recurring fees for software and help running the systems.
One of the newest customers, liquor distributor Southern Glazers Wine & Spirits, spent months visiting warehouses to watch the Symbotic system in action. The distributor, which makes 7 million deliveries per year to 260,000 retail customers, expects the technology to reduce its error rate assembling pallets from 5 percent to 0.1 percent or less.
Cohen helped close the deal himself, according to Bobby Burg, chief supply chain officer for Southern Glazers.
He seems to have an endless supply of ideas, but very easy to talk to, Burg said. He runs a business and obviously knows the things that a new customer like ourselves would need to hear. [He] did a good job really making us comfortable.
Aaron Pressman can be reached at aaron.pressman@globe.com. Follow him @ampressman.
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Who is Rick Cohen, the New Hampshire billionaire behind Symbotic? - The Boston Globe
