The holiday season brings with it the comfort of traditional year-end celebrations. These events can vary widely depending on where you live, but they typically involve large meals with family and friends. At Dematic, we are proud to be part of an organization that ensures holiday dinners around the world are the best they can be.

Before you sit down to enjoy a feast with your loved ones, Dematic automation solutions have been working behind the scenes to ensure you have everything you need to make it one to remember. From the guaranteed freshness of the main course to last-minute deliveries of side dishes and drinks, supply chain automation plays a big role in setting the table. These are just some of the ways automation helps make your holiday dinners a success.

When it comes to a holiday dinner, it’s best not to leave anything to chance. But while you are concentrating on handling the food preparation, the cooking, and the serving, there is so much more that needs to go right before you even get started — multiple steps and complex systems that make sure your food is delivered to you fresh and safe.

Dematic provides a portfolio of warehouse logistics solutions for food and beverage producers and distributors, ranging from regional institutional distributors to large multi-national food producers. These solutions manage the specific food and beverage order fulfillment requirements of grocery stores, convenience stores, and other institutions.

A great example of this is the Dematic solution for John Dee, an Australian company with four generations of experience in producing and selling outstanding beef products. It features a Dematic Multishuttle® designed for chilled and frozen work environments that automatically stores product cartons coming out of production and builds and sequences the cartons for automated palletization and direct container loading. Your main course just might be a premium beef roast from John Dee!

Making sure food is safe and fresh is, of course, important at any time of year, but especially during the holidays. The Dazhang Group in Henan Province, China has been committed to building food storage and distribution centers with a focus on food quality and freshness, with its mission to ensure food safety and maximum convenience for its customers since 2003.

Dematic solutions can also automate food production processes. For example, to ensure optimum conditions for ripening, cheese manufacturer Vorarlberg Milch uses Dematic Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) to manage the process. At exactly the right time, AGVs transport cheeses stored in a natural cellar to a machine that turns them and rubs them with saffron water, then moves them to another temperature zone for the next ripening phase. The result is a smooth yet strong cheese with all the characteristics of an artisanal product, perfect for your holiday table.

Cranberry sauce, brussels sprouts, figgy pudding — whatever happens to be your traditional side dish — they are essential to success of a special feast, but just might be overlooked in the holiday rush. Dematic has your back for last-minute shopping items. Whether it’s a quick dash to a local supermarket or slightly panicked online order, Dematic automated solutions support the means for those special items to get to your kitchen in time.

Retail grocers have questions for meeting the growing demand for aisle-ready deliveries from their distribution centers and the increased need for on-demand delivery and click-and-collect pick up. Dematic has answers with automated solutions that provide smarter, more efficient, more productive grocery distribution that meet those demands (and ensures your traditional side dish are on your holiday table).

For instance, the Dematic Micro-Fulfilment solution provides compact, fast, and flexible order processing that adds capacity and flexibility to the supply chain, enabling retailers to fulfill online orders from existing retail store space. This solution assists grocers in adjusting supply chains according to demand so must-have items can reach you as soon as possible.

Another great example is a Dematic goods-to-person order fulfillment system for Associated Grocers of New England, which has allowed them to take on an ever-increasing number of product types and varieties and fulfill them from an extremely compact space. The full automation and space efficiency supports their item growth and offers our its customers (independent retail grocers of every store size and format) a vastly expanded selection of food products to provide consumers. Presumably, even figgy pudding.

Whether you prefer sparkling wine or sparkling water, beverages are an integral part of a holiday meal. But you may not be aware of is the automation technology behind safely transporting these beverages, which are by their nature very heavy and often contained in delicate materials such as glass. Extra care must be taken for handling but without compromising on efficiency.

Dematic AGVs transport items safely around a warehouse without manual intervention but with speed and accuracy. They protect workplace safety by minimizing human interaction in the warehouse environment. And AGVs can be deployed easily within existing delivery and storage systems.

Lion Beverage selected a Dematic AGV system for their Tooheys Brewery facility in the Sydney area of Australia for its reliability and consistency in eliminating traffic blockages, which keeps products moving safely within their entire operation. AGVs provide Lion with the ability to keep beverages flowing — non-stop 24/7 — to make sure your drink of preference is on your holiday table.

No matter how you celebrate the holidays or when you gather for a festive meal, it’s more than likely that Dematic automation contributed to its journey to your table. From safe storage to rapid delivery, Dematic solutions for the grocery and for food and beverage are truly gifts that keeps on giving — for the holidays and all year long!