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Grocer Pilots Autonomous Micro-Factory for More Sustainable Ice

Relocalize, a provider of hyper-local automated micro-factories, partners with Southeastern Grocers in a pilot to produce a more sustainable, high-quality ice product manufactured and packaged near the point of distribution.

Relocalize 1 Sustainable Packaging
Executives from Southeastern Grocers and Relocalize, including Dewayne Rabon of SEG (far right) and Wayne McIntyre of Relocalize (third from left), celebrate the launch of the first autonomous ice-making micro-factory while holding up bags of SEG’s new Party Cube product.

In March 2023, technology startup Relocalize joined Southeastern Grocers to cut the ribbon—or rather chainsaw through a 200-lb block of ice fashioned into a ribbon—in celebration of the opening of a pilot micro-factory for a new ice product at SEG’s Jacksonville Distribution Center in Jacksonville, Fla. Relocalize is a technology startup from Montreal, Canada, that provides automated food production platforms as a service (PaaS) to grocery and convenience retailers in the form of shipping container-based micro-factories driven entirely by artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics.

Since it was founded in late 2020, Relocalize has been on a mission to disrupt the $1 trillion-plus CPG ice and beverage category by hyper-localizing the production of these water-based products to eliminate 100% of transportation CO2 and waste. Each of its micro-factories is engineered to handle all the processes of a traditional factory—i.e., production, processing, material handling, packaging, palletizing, inventory management, and food safety—at approximately one-twentieth the scale, by being located at the retailer’s distribution or fulfillment centers.

As part of the SEG micro-factory pilot, Relocalize and SEG also collaborated to develop a new 6-lb ice product, marketed as SE Grocers Party Cubes, that is more compact and space efficient, offers better quality and food safety, reduces waste, and uses recyclable film packaging.

Sustainable product, affordable price

As Wayne McIntyre, co-founder and chief executive officer of Relocalize shares, the inspiration for the micro-factory strategy was born from both a personal passion for sustainability as well as a way to address the challenge of providing sustainable, high-quality food at an affordable price.

“The genesis of this project was thinking about where we could actually calibrate sustainability and value at the same time for retailers, packaged food companies and, of course, consumers,” says McIntyre. “What we stumbled upon was that there’s one area where these things come together, and that is when you have products that are very heavy and very expensive to transport on trucks, especially with all the inflation during COVID and the increased cost of logistics. It then became clear to us that products made primarily of water are really the best place to get started, where you get both great economics and good value, as well as actually make a huge sustainability impact.”

According to McIntyre, through its analysis, Relocalize determined that even for reasonably local products, transportation between the point of production and the distribution center results in a large amount of carbon. “In fact, our analysis indicates that even when your production facility is within, say, 20 miles of a distribution center, the carbon footprint from transportation is still more than 50% higher than producing it right at the distribution center,” he says. “And when you have a product that’s produced far away, you’re talking about a 90% CO2 reduction just by producing the product at the point of distribution instead and eliminating the entire middle-mile portion of the logistics journey.”


   Read about a similar concept, this one for bottled water, in this article on the Boomerang Bottling System, “Disruptive Bottling System Closes the Loop.”


Among the benefits cited by Relocalize of producing the product at the retailer’s distribution or fulfillment center are that it breaks long supply chains and increases resilience, makes food more affordable by cutting fuel and logistics costs, and cuts tailpipe and greenhouse gas emissions.

Given Relocalize’s focus on products that are primarily water, ice was top of mind when it came to deciding which product to pursue first. “We started with ice because the standard practice of trucking frozen water long distances just doesn’t make ecological or economic sense,” says McIntyre. “Twenty-four billion pounds of packaged ice travel across the United States and Canada from centralized production plants to retailers.” According to the company, by re-localizing packaged ice alone, CO2 emissions in North America could be reduced by more than 1.3 metric tons per year.

McIntyre adds that ice had a certain allure as well because packaged ice as an industry hasn’t changed in decades. “We had an opportunity to not just reinvent where the product was being made, and what kind of factory it was being made in, but also to reinvent the product itself,” he says. “The Relocalize ice product and the SEG packed ice product is truly a unique, different product—different in shape, different in its packaging, different in so many ways.”

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