Humanoid Robots Are Learning the Night Shift at Danish Supermarkets

So basically: When a supermarket in Denmark closes for the night, the robots come out. A startup called HIVE Robots has humanoids restocking shelves at føtex, one of Denmark’s biggest grocery chains. New AP and Euronews footage released this weekend shows them at work in empty aisles. Right now a human is still supervising. The goal is for them to work the night shift on their own by early 2027.

What the robots do

The job is simple to describe and hard to do: take products out of boxes and put them on the right shelf, facing the right way. Cans of tomatoes. Cereal. Bottles. The kind of work that eats up hours every night in every grocery store on the planet.

HIVE’s robots stand about 182 cm tall, a bit under 6 feet, which lets them reach the top shelves. They run on a mix of onboard AI and remote human operators that HIVE calls “robotpilots.” When the robot gets confused, a person steps in from a screen. Every one of those moments becomes training data.

Why a humanoid and not a regular robot

This is the part that makes sense to me. A supermarket is built for people. The aisles are people width, the shelves are people height, and the carts are people shaped. Warehouse robots usually need the building rebuilt around them.

føtex’s operations director Simon Kudsk said almost exactly that when the deal was announced in March. A humanoid has the same shape as the workers the store was designed for, so it can move around the store naturally and safely without tearing anything out.

How long this has been going

This isn’t a one day stunt:

• March 2026: HIVE and føtex sign a multi year partnership.
• June 2026: robots start training in stores after closing time.
• Oct. 11, 2026: AP and Euronews publish footage of them stocking shelves.
• Early 2027: target for robots working without a supervisor watching.

HIVE has a team of more than ten software engineers training the system on real store data.

The business model

HIVE doesn’t sell the robots. It rents out the work. The pitch on its site is basically “you don’t buy a robot, you pay per hour.” The store gets shelves stocked overnight, and HIVE handles the hardware, the software, and the repairs.

Neither company has said how many stores are in the pilot or what that hourly rate is. That’s the number everyone in retail will want to see.

Why night shift first

Night work is expensive and hard to staff, especially in Denmark where overnight pay comes with premiums. It’s also low risk. There are no shoppers to bump into, and if a robot drops a box of cereal at 2 a.m., nobody gets hurt. Pretty much every early humanoid job this year looks like this: dull, repetitive, and after hours.

The pitch is that the staff stops spending hours stacking cans and spends more time actually helping customers during the day.

AP’s footage shows the robots slowly picking up cans and placing them one at a time. It isn’t fast yet. But speed is the easiest thing to improve once the robot knows what it’s doing.

My take

I think this is the most realistic humanoid job I’ve seen this year. It isn’t flips or kung fu. It’s a robot putting tomatoes on a shelf in an empty store at night. That’s how this stuff actually shows up in your life. One morning you walk into the grocery store, every shelf is full, and nobody you know worked the night before. The question I’d watch is the hourly rate. Once a robot’s hour costs less than a person’s night shift hour, this goes from one Danish chain to every chain.