GrabMart pickers can now grab groceries at Jaya Grocer stores twice as fast

Ayush Singhal, Senior Product Management Leader, Online Delivery Reliability

. August 3, 2023 . Malaysia

This article was updated on June 13, 2025 to reflect the picker app’s new batching capabilities.

At the supermarket, you typically have to wander up and down the aisles more than once to gather everything you need.

If you shop for groceries professionally, for example as a “picker” for an online grocery store like GrabMart, you can’t afford these inefficiencies. Getting lost between isles translates to fewer jobs completed per hour and more time on your feet.

To help pickers find their way through stores more efficiently, GrabMart came up with a better way to guide them—starting with the outlets of Jaya Grocer, a supermarket chain in Malaysia.

(Grab acquired Jaya Grocer in 2022. You can read more about how we integrated Jaya Grocer into GrabMart.)

The aim is to reduce the time required to collect all items of an order. This helps the team fulfill more orders per hour and saves man-hour costs in each outlet.

One way to get more efficient is by grouping items by category, say fresh fruit first before going to dry goods. However, that’s not enough. The categories should also be sequenced so that each packer moves through an aisle just once, on an optimal route.

This efficiency improvement is key, now that Jaya Grocer is part of Grab and is seeing a higher volume of orders.

One route to rule them all

Achieving this required careful planning, and a custom map for each Jaya Grocer store.

When we integrated Jaya Grocer’s outlets into Grab, pickers used the existing GrabMart picker app to navigate them. This app organised groceries into standard categories, like fruits and dairy. To improve the experience for Jaya Grocer orders, the team needed a map of each outlet to determine the optimal route to collect all items.

First, we got each Jaya Grocer store’s master list into our system. This list has each item marked by a unique location code in the store, telling us which aisle, bay, and shelf it’s in.

Then our backend system draws a location sequence path through the store, and this is displayed in-app, to the picker, as a guided path.

Our initial target was to get from an average of 70 picking jobs per hour to 95. In our first pilot test back in 2023, we surpassed this goal and reached 132 jobs done per hour instead!

Batching orders

We also introduced a way for pickers to gather multiple orders at the same time. We gave the app an update that allows pickers to select which orders to batch together, while the system also suggests the optimal orders to combine for maximum efficiency.

The app then pulls everything into one streamlined shopping list so pickers can easily fulfill multiple orders simultaneously. This means fewer trips through the store, more orders completed in one go, and shorter wait times for delivery-partners.

Going live

The latest update to the picker app is currently live in two Jaya Grocer stores and will be rolled out across over 50 outlets this month.

Outside of Malaysia, the picker app is available in GrabMart’s dark stores in Indonesia too, as we prepare to cover more GrabMart facilities across Southeast Asia.

With the e-grocery boom predicted to continue, these backend improvements allow our operations to scale up while helping our staff be more efficient.

Food and deliveries

GrabMart pickers can now grab groceries at Jaya Grocer stores twice as fast

One route to rule them all

Batching orders

Going live

Komsan Chiyadis

Komsan Chiyadis