When one supermarket chain buys another, how do its warehouse footprint and store deliveries change?

Tegut’s revenue of about €1.3bn across roughly 300 stores gives about €4.3m in sales per store. About a fifth of a supermarket’s sales usually bypass the warehouse: beverages, bread and regional suppliers deliver directly. At about €650 of goods per roll container, the rest is about 5,300 RC a year, which we round to 5,500, or around 18 per delivery day. The 369 stores in our area need 2.0 million RC a year. As a check, Tegut’s roughly 300 stores would need about 1.65 million RC a year from Hünfeld, around 150 truckloads per working day. Frozen goods usually run through separate warehouses and are left out.

Tegut’s teo micro-stores, small automated shops without staff, are cleared too, but the published list does not locate them, so they are left out. Because every store has the same demand, a different volume changes every cost figure in proportion and leaves the assignments unchanged. Section 05 shows the results at 7,500 RC per store.

Road distances between each warehouse and store come from OpenStreetMap routing. The cost of a truck journey starts with a rate per truck-kilometre, excluding tolls: €1.50 for an ambient truck and €1.70 for a refrigerated one. Allowances for return driving, tolls and delivery routing follow.

Two allowances account for driving beyond the direct warehouse-to-store journey:

• Return driving: add 55% for dry goods and 70% for fresh goods. It allocates part of the return-driving cost to the delivery, and tolls follow the same share. Refrigerated trucks carry fewer goods back on the return leg. It does not mean that the model calculates a return route.
• Delivery routing: add 15% for dry goods and 20% for fresh goods. This is a cost allowance for a delivery tour being longer or more involved than a direct connection; fresh goods go to stores more often, in smaller drops. The model does not calculate the sequence of stops.

Both allowances are estimates. Return driving and delivery routing can overlap in practice, so their combined effect needs checking against actual tour costs. They do not replace a vehicle-routing calculation.

The effective load is the truck’s roll-container capacity multiplied by its assumed utilisation: 48 RC at 85%, or 40.8 RC, for dry goods, and 44 RC at 75%, or 33 RC, for fresh goods, which leave the warehouse daily in smaller loads. For the 100 km example, that gives €7.62 per RC for dry goods and €12.01 for fresh goods. The model applies the same formulas to every warehouse–store pair.

These are model assumptions, not disclosed site costs. Fresh goods cost more to handle because of chilled storage and cold-zone work, and they are picked by hand everywhere. Section 05 tests a smaller and a larger automation advantage.

Why different rates? The intralogistics supplier SSI Schäfer’s Hünfeld project announcement describes automated pallet and shuttle storage feeding seven picking workstations. Seven workstations cannot pick a whole network’s volume, so fast-moving goods are still picked by hand, and the saving lies mainly in storage and replenishment. WITRON’s 2029 project announcement describes 18 machines that stack cases onto roll containers automatically, which replaces most of the picking work. Neither source gives handling costs per RC.

Automation can reduce picking effort without reducing every warehouse cost by the same percentage. De Koster, Le-Duc and Roodbergen’s literature review reports that picking can account for up to 55% of warehouse operating expense. That supports a cautious distinction between picking productivity and total handling cost; it does not establish a tariff for these sites.

The rates are our modelling choice. A site-specific estimate would need receiving, replenishment, picking, staging and loading, maintenance and energy on a consistent basis, with capital and fixed costs accounted for separately.