Rick Cohen and the education of a cardboard box

At four in the morning, a warehouse offers a rather stern review of a business plan. Either the goods move or they do not. In the summer of 2020, Rick Cohen and his chief information officer, George Dramalis, spent a week watching robots work at Walmart’s Brooksville, Florida, distribution center before breakfast. Congestion at the drop-off points helped reveal a design problem. More lanes were needed. The breakfast discussions took place at Waffle House or McDonald’s. Corporate strategy occasionally comes with hash browns.

Cohen had another instrument for evaluating his machines: a stopwatch. He wanted inbound processing to rise from 900 cases an hour in December 2019 to 1,650. The effort acquired a suitably blunt name, “1650 or Bust.” The goal was first reached a little over a year later at an Albertsons warehouse near Chicago. These are revealing details about a chairman and chief executive whose business depends on artificial intelligence. He still wanted to stand there and count.

Today, Cohen leads Symbotic, the Wilmington, Massachusetts, warehouse automation company he founded after years in grocery distribution. His route into robotics began with an unusually thorough acquaintance with the customer’s problem. He was the customer. Long before a robot had to find its way through a storage structure, a Cohen family business had to get groceries to a store.

A business education, by the case

Cohen grew up working summers for his father at C&S Wholesale Grocers. He joined full time after graduating in 1974 from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he studied accounting. In 1989, he became C&S’s chairman, president and chief executive. He was the third generation of his family to lead it. He remained president until March 2014 and chief executive until January 2018; he is now executive chairman.

The family connection supplied more than a job. It supplied years of exposure to the small dependencies that make a warehouse run: an arrival, a storage location, an order, a departure. A delay in one place can become somebody else’s problem several steps later. A distributor gets an education in consequences every working day. The syllabus is delivered on pallets.

His studies also left a practical residue. Cohen recalls programming in Fortran during his senior year and bringing computers into C&S early. In a May 2026 interview, he described his interest in the relationship between people and the processes of moving goods. Accounting, statistics and computing were useful companions for someone trying to understand an operation through its moving parts.

By the early 2000s, C&S’s growth and changing customer demands had made automation a pressing concern. Cohen could not find an end-to-end system that met the combination of speed, accuracy, flexibility and durability he wanted. He invested in a smaller business that became Symbotic. The company dates its founding to 2006. The idea emerged from an operator’s shopping list, with the inconvenient discovery that the desired item was unavailable.

The box has a complicated itinerary

To understand the attraction, follow a case of goods. Symbotic’s distribution system takes apart incoming pallets, scans cases, stores them, retrieves them and assembles outgoing loads. Robotic arms, mobile robots, storage structures and software all have jobs. The useful unit of analysis is the journey through the building, because a quick machine can still spend its time waiting for the next machine.

Consider the outgoing pallet. Its contents have different weights, shapes and tolerances for being crushed. The stack must survive a trip. It also needs to be useful when it arrives. Symbotic’s system accounts for those packaging properties and can arrange goods according to their destination in a store. The person replenishing the shelves inherits decisions made back at the distribution center.

This helps explain why a grocer would care about the whole arrangement. A neatly completed task inside a warehouse is only part of the purchase. The retailer ultimately needs the correct goods in the correct place, with a load that can be handled sensibly. A carton of cereal enjoys very little public attention, but a surprising number of decisions accompany its travels.

Walmart began testing with Symbotic in Brooksville in 2017. In July 2021, it announced plans to take the technology to 25 regional distribution centers. Its explanation emphasized dense storage and pallets organized for stores and aisles. Those details connect the machinery to the daily work of retail. The robot’s performance matters partly because of what happens after the robot has finished.

Forty-two buildings, and a public company

In May 2022, Walmart expanded its agreement to all 42 of its regional distribution centers. That was an announced deployment program extending over years, with the retrofit then expected to take more than eight years. The distinction matters. An agreement is a commitment to undertake work. A functioning building is the result of carrying it out.

For Cohen, the agreement brought the demands of a large customer into the center of his robotics business. Accuracy, capacity and the ability to respond to store orders became questions to answer across a network. The scale changed the assignment: a system that works in one place must be installed, supported and operated in many places, each with business to keep doing.

Symbotic’s merger with the SoftBank-sponsored SVF Investment Corp. 3 closed on June 7, 2022, taking the company public. Cohen became chief executive of the public company in November that year, having previously led Symbotic LLC. His career now connected the obligations of a family grocery enterprise with those of a listed robotics supplier.

The partnership moved closer to the store in January 2025, when Symbotic acquired Walmart’s Advanced Systems & Robotics business. The accompanying development arrangement included $520 million in research and development fees from Walmart. A commitment to purchase 400 accelerated pickup and delivery systems depended on meeting specified performance metrics. It was another assignment with a test attached.

For a reader accustomed to treating an announced order as a completed sale, that condition is worth keeping in view. The work has to satisfy the agreement. Cohen’s old world of goods moving through buildings remains present beneath the newer vocabulary. The customer still expects something concrete to happen at the other end.

A sales pitch with the failures left in

Cohen has an unusual way of describing his rapport with early adopters. In 2026, he said he starts by telling them about roughly 50 of his worst failures, coupled with a promise to avoid repeating them. A sales meeting organized around past mistakes requires some confidence in the customer’s appetite for detail. It also makes sense for equipment that must earn its place inside a working business.

“There’s good chemistry between me and the early adopters”

Rick Cohen, May 2026

He has said dense storage makes it possible to automate a facility while it remains operating. For a distributor, that claim addresses an immediate practical concern: how to change the building while orders continue to arrive. The machinery belongs to a larger operating problem. So does the installation.

The same concern with access appeared in a different form in July 2023. Symbotic and SoftBank established GreenBox, a warehouse-as-a-service venture. SoftBank owned 65 percent and Symbotic 35 percent. The associated contract called for approximately $7.5 billion in Symbotic systems over its term. The aim was to make automated warehousing available as a service to customers who would otherwise face the cost and complexity of building it themselves.

GreenBox rebranded as Exol in December 2025. The proposition broadens the audience for Cohen’s work: businesses can buy access to logistics capabilities instead of commissioning an entire automated warehouse. It is a familiar business question wearing industrial clothing. How many prospective customers need the outcome but cannot justify owning the equipment?

There is also a quieter, local strand to his record. In 2001, Rick and Jan Cohen made a gift supporting Keene State College’s Holocaust studies center, which was renamed in honor of his parents, Lester and Norma. Their support connects the family name with an educational institution in New Hampshire, alongside the businesses that account for most of his public visibility.

The next bottleneck is already waiting

On October 13, 2026, Symbotic announced its acquisition of cellumation, based in Bremen, Germany. Its celluveyor uses individually controlled cells to move items in different directions across a sorting surface. Symbotic plans to use the technology to improve space use and simplify parts of its systems. The acquired company will continue operating under its own name, with its founders remaining in leadership.

The deal gives Cohen’s company another way to address the paths goods take between operations, along with a larger presence in Europe. The promised improvements remain goals to deliver. But the direction is recognizable: keep looking at the route, find the constraint, then work on the equipment and software around it.

The public business now produces numbers of its own. For the quarter ended June 27, 2026, Symbotic reported $721 million in revenue, up 22 percent from a year earlier, and $55 million in net income. In August it also announced the election of former Bain Capital co-chair Steve Pagliuca to the board. Cohen’s warehouse project has acquired a substantial institutional life.

Yet the early-morning scene in Florida remains a useful way to understand him. A system has been built, people have invested in it, and the cases are moving. Then traffic gathers where it should disperse. The next decision begins with noticing precisely where. For all the sophistication around Cohen’s work, there is still room beside the machinery for someone who has spent a lifetime watching a box arrive late.