Retail

Latin American c-store/foodservice concern invests in robotic retail provider Swyft

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August 18, 2021

Fomento Económico Mexicano, a convenience store operator and food and beverage distributor in Latin America, has made a strategic investment in Swyft Inc., a provider of robotic and unattended delivery for brands, merchants and last-mile providers, according to a press release. The amount of the investment was not revealed.

"Autonomous, touchless grab-and-go solutions are the future of our industry and we're pleased that one of our companies is already manufacturing equipment for Swyft.," Javier Garcia, FEMSA's director of corporate venturing and growth capital, said in the release.

"We're already leveraging FEMSA's high quality and large-scale manufacturing capabilities to launch our cost-effective grab-and-go solutions into the U.S. market." Swyft CEO Gower Smith said in the release. "These disruptive systems are like Amazon Go in a box and have wide scale application in retail and vending."

As the largest bottler of Coca-Cola products by volume, the second-largest shareholder of Heineken and an investor in commercial refrigeration company Imbera, FEMSA also touches the retail industry through FEMSA Comercio, a division which operates Oxxo, a chain of small-format stores that serves 13.2 million customers daily and operates nearly 20,000 stores in the U.S., Mexico, Chile, Columbia and Peru.