Smooth delivery: How we make the complexity of online grocery look so simple
A grocery logistics operation running at genuine peak performance looks, from the outside, almost boring. Orders come in, products are picked and packed, orders are delivered, customers receive exactly what they expected, when they expected it. The temptation, watching it work, is to think there isn't much going on.
The fact is that the complexity is most certainly still there, it’s just solved in a way that makes it invisible to the operator, by design.
Simplicity can be deceiving
A single online grocery order can run to 40–60 items, span three temperature zones, weigh around 20 kilograms, and include fragile goods that can’t touch frozen ones. That’s one order. And the variables don’t stop there; they interact with each other in ways that make isolated optimization almost meaningless. Picking speed affects packing efficiency. Packing efficiency affects load planning. Load planning affects route density. Route density affects delivery slot availability. Delivery slot availability affects order volume. And threaded through all of that are perishability windows, substitution rates, labour throughput, and customer expectations that have been rising without interruption for more than a decade.
Some operations have solved parts of this. A well-run grid system can achieve strong picking numbers, for example, or a smart route planning tool can improve delivery density. But integrating partial solutions doesn’t produce a coherent system. The seams between them are where complexity accumulates, costs hide, and performance degrades under pressure.
The industry has lived with this for long enough that a certain amount of managed chaos has come to feel normal. Workarounds become processes, and then those processes become infrastructure. And the real cost of the entire system, distributed across a hundred small inefficiencies, becomes very difficult to see clearly.
What’s running beneath the surface
Oda Systems powers live online grocery businesses in Norway and Sweden, one of the most efficient systems of its kind anywhere in the world, with end-to-end fulfillment performance of over 300 units fulfilled and 4.3 deliveries completed per hour. The platform powering it handles an enormous amount on behalf of the operator: 3D packing optimisation, conveyor routing, continuous route planning, substitution logic, slot management. At any given moment, a large number of interdependent decisions are being made and adjusted in real time, invisibly, so that the folks running the operation never have to make them.
And that’s the point. The complexity is still there, and nothing about online grocery has become simpler. What’s changed is where it lives and who’s responsible for maintaining and improving its performance.
What Oda Systems offers retailers is a hardware blueprint, a comprehensive software platform and organizational model, and a process playbook that have been developed together, for each other, by a team that runs a live operation on the same platform every single day. When something needs to improve, the consequences of not improving it are immediate. This kind of continuous live testing keeps the system honest in a way that is difficult to replicate from the outside.
When Mathem, Sweden’s pioneering online grocer, implemented Oda Systems in 2024, the results were transformative. Fulfillment efficiency climbed from 95 to nearly 250 UPH. Food waste fell to 0.3 percent. Fixed costs dropped by 60% while output more than doubled. Those numbers reflect what becomes possible when the complexity of online grocery is handled at the platform level rather than absorbed by the operator.
The difference between knowing and seeing
Hearing about or imagining end-result simplicity can be a recipe for believing it’s simple to achieve. You really do have to see it to understand it.
There’s a point in almost every conversation about Oda Systems where the logic becomes clear, the principles make sense, and the performance data is credible. A sharp logistics professional can follow the reasoning and arrive at a solid picture of what the system does.
That picture is accurate; it’s also incomplete.
What a conversation can’t easily convey is the scale and continuity of what’s actually running. Visitors to our fulfillment center in Oslo tend to notice over the course of their tour a sense of unfamiliar and unexpected calm. That’s not because of anything being explicitly demonstrated to them, but because a working operation that has genuinely absorbed operational complexities feels qualitatively different—and a lot less chaotic—than one that’s just managing it. The questions people have when they arrive are good ones, but the questions they leave with are different, and more grounded, because they’ve seen it work rather than just been told that it does.
To put it plainly, an operation with an efficiency rate of 300 UPH only needs a third of the people to achieve the same result as a fulfillment center running at 100, which naturally leads to that sense of calm.
An open invitation
We run facility tours in Oslo for grocery logistics professionals, operations leaders, and retail executives who want to truly understand what’s genuinely possible in online grocery. These sessions are hands-on and unhurried. There’s no long-winded pitch to sit through; the operations are the conversation.
If you’re thinking seriously about the efficiency and profitability of your online grocery business, we’d like to show you what we’ve built. We’re sometimes told our results sound impossible, but in our case seeing really is believing.
To arrange a guided tour of our fulfillment center in Lier, just outside of Oslo, get in touch with us and we’ll make it happen.