Whether you make it, wholesale it, or distribute it — SKU proliferation, mixed-zone cold chain, DSD profiles, and retail pallet compliance all handled by one system.
SKUs handled natively — no reconfiguration
Arctic Series cold chain rating
Labor reduction at live F&B deployment
System for ambient and frozen
Whether you’re a food manufacturer shipping to retail DCs, a wholesaler supplying foodservice, or a distributor running DSD routes to hundreds of store locations — the operational complexity has roughly tripled in ten years.
Product lines that ran 400 SKUs now run 1,000+. Retail pallet compliance specs get stricter every year. Cold chain spans ambient, refrigerated, and frozen under the same roof. DSD customers demand exact order accuracy on every drop. And the labor to handle all of it is harder to find and keep than it’s ever been.
Legacy systems were designed for simpler operations. They weren’t built for this — and the complexity isn’t going away.
Modern F&B lines have tripled SKU counts in the last decade. Most automation systems can’t keep up without constant reconfiguration.
Ambient, refrigerated, and frozen often live under one roof. Most robotics vendors stop at the freezer door.
DSD means low quantity per line, high SKU mix, every order different. Retail compliance means pallet configuration specs that get rejected and charged back if wrong.
Every additional SKU in a conventional DC is another static donor position to manage, another map to update, another failure point. When your product line doubles, your complexity more than doubles.
Bullseye Scheduling changes the model entirely. Donor positions are managed dynamically in real time — there is no static map to maintain. You can add SKUs without adding complexity, retraining the system, or touching the hardware.
F&B operations that were frozen at 400 SKUs can now run 1,000+ without a second system, a second vendor, or a second wave of labor.
Prime’s pick orchestration manages donor positions in real time — no static position map to maintain as your SKU count grows.
Most automation vendors stop at the freezer door. Arctic Series MobilePallet AMR, MobileShelf AMR, and RackBot operate continuously at −20°F. Same robots, same PES orchestration, same WorkFlow Studio configuration — just rated for freezer conditions.
One system for ambient and frozen. One vendor accountable for the whole operation. If you run both temperature zones, you no longer need separate vendors, separate software, or separate service relationships for each.
Battery runtime in freezer environments: 6–8 hours of continuous operation with hot-swap capability to eliminate downtime windows.
Continuous freezer operation. MobilePallet, MobileShelf, and RackBot all certified for full-freezer environments at this temperature.
In-freezer operation with hot-swap battery capability. No downtime windows required for charging cycles during a shift.
Most F&B distribution operations run both temperature zones in the same building. Ambient product on one side, freezer on the other — and a loading dock in between where those two worlds meet.
That dock is where cold chain breaks happen. Every minute a frozen pallet spends outside its controlled environment — staged on the dock, waiting for a trailer door, sitting in sequence — is a temperature excursion. Regulators track it. Retail customers penalize it. Your QA team documents it.
The industry calls the measured duration dock exposure time. Reducing it requires knowing, in real time, what both sides of the operation are doing: when the frozen pallet will arrive at the dock, when the trailer will be ready, and how to sequence the build so frozen product is the last thing staged before the door closes — not the first.
A two-vendor setup cannot do this. The ambient WES doesn’t know what the freezer AMR is doing. The freezer system doesn’t know the trailer status. Coordination requires a shared brain.
Because PES orchestrates ambient and frozen operations in a single platform, staging sequences can be coordinated around dock exposure time — minimizing the window frozen product spends outside its controlled environment. No two-vendor architecture can coordinate at this level.
Cross-zone dock exposure sequencing is a platform capability enabled by PES unified orchestration. Configuration is customer-specific.
Direct Store Delivery is one of the hardest outbound profiles to automate. Low quantity per line, high SKU mix, every order different, strict sequence requirements for route-ready loading.
Bullseye Scheduling was built for exactly this profile. It doesn’t treat DSD orders as exceptions — they’re the expected input. The system sequences picks by stop, by route, by SKU mix, without manual intervention.
At a Regional Snack Food Distributor running DSD operations, the labor ratio improved from 9 workers doing what 1 now does — an 89% reduction in outbound labor, without adding footprint or capital equipment beyond the robotic system itself.
Regional Snack Food Distributor running DSD outbound. Nine workers doing what one now does. No additional square footage required.
F&B automation ROI is durable because the underlying drivers don’t improve in a downturn. Labor cost, labor availability, and SKU complexity don’t get easier during a recession — they stay the same or get worse. People still eat.
Industry data consistently positions F&B as one of the most recession-resilient automation verticals. The business case for automating a DSD operation or a cold-chain outbound floor doesn’t depend on a favorable economic cycle. It depends on labor math that doesn’t change regardless of what the broader economy does.
Prime deployments in F&B are available as RaaS (Robotics as a Service), converting capital expenditure to an operational line item. That structure makes the business case defensible in any budget review.
Dynamic donor position management for high-SKU mixed outbound. No static map to maintain. Scales as your SKU count grows without reconfiguration.
Full-freezer AMR and shuttle operation, continuous. Same robots, same PES, same software — just rated for cold chain environments.
Low quantity per line, high SKU mix, route-ready sequencing handled natively. Not a workaround — built into the scheduling engine.
PrimeOS software orchestrates every robot, station, and device across ambient and frozen — one system, one vendor, one point of accountability.
Operational expense model. Convert capital outlay to a predictable monthly cost. Budget-defensible in any economic environment.
17 station types covering every F&B workflow — rainbow pallets, DSD builds, cold and ambient, heavy beverage, tall pallet, retail compliance — all orchestrated by PrimeOS.
No two F&B operations are the same. A snack food manufacturer shipping to club retail doesn’t look like a beverage wholesaler running DSD routes. A frozen food distributor doesn’t look like a foodservice supplier managing ambient and refrigerated in the same building.
What they share is the need for product to move automatically through the facility — from receiving to pick to build to dock — without people filling the gaps between systems.
Prime’s catalog of stations, robots, and workflows is broad enough that the right combination exists for your specific operation. PrimeOS orchestrates whatever is selected as a single unified system. The robots hand off to the stations. The stations feed the dock. The dock coordinates with the outbound sequence. No manual handoffs. No seams between vendors.
The breadth of the catalog means you don’t make compromises to fit a system that wasn’t designed for your workflows. The system is composed around yours.
Rainbow pallets to exact retail spec. High SKU count. Tight layer pattern compliance. Bullseye Scheduling manages donor positions dynamically — chargebacks caught at the station, not at the customer’s DC.
Arctic Series AMRs in the freezer. Ambient stations on the dry side. PES sequences the outbound build across both zones, coordinating dock exposure time so frozen product is staged last.
Heavy pallets up to 4,400 lb. High case volume, limited SKU variety. DSD route sequencing so every stop is loaded in order. MobilePallet AMR handles the weight. PES handles the sequence.
Wide SKU range, variable order sizes, exact case-count accuracy. Mixed ambient and refrigerated product on the same outbound pallet. Stations compose the right build automatically from a single workflow directive.
Tell us about your operation and we’ll show you how Bullseye Scheduling, Arctic Series, and PES handle your specific F&B challenges — SKU proliferation, cold chain, DSD, or all three.
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