LogTech News 09/2026

Welcome back, fellow logistics enthusiasts!

Rewe is picking groceries out of its regular supermarkets again, ten years after dropping the idea, and explaining why the numbers work this time. Wolt spent August adding categories, from household items to organic supermarkets to slow-luxury fashion. Drone delivery also moved twice, with Amazon aiming Prime Air at nearly 500 U.S. cities and Uber putting Zipline's aircraft inside the Uber Eats app. Plus a look at how MotionTools is shifting from supporting your work to actually doing your work.

And as always, you'll find the latest MotionTools release notes at the bottom.

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📢 What the industry was up to

🏪 Rewe’s multichannel bet

Rewe is testing quick delivery out of its regular supermarkets, with Wolt in Munich and Lieferando in Jena. The test sits inside a wider multichannel bet: rather than picking one winning model, Rewe is running delivery and pickup as two pillars and treating them as one business, on the assumption that customers who use more channels spend more. Clemens Bauer, Director REWE E-Commerce, told Supermarktblog that Rewe's e-food business, delivery and pickup combined, is growing around 20% a year and should reach operational break-even in 2026. Rewe picked from stores once before, around ten years ago, and stopped because online and in-store shoppers kept buying the same stock out from under each other. Better availability forecasting has changed that calculation, and Bauer points to Sainsbury's combining its store and picking manager roles as the setup that makes it work.

The same willingness to test and drop things shows up in Rewe's autonomy projects. In Hamburg, the delivery bot test we covered last October was ended because although it worked technically and customers took to it, integrating it into the app would have cost too much and licensing hurdles remain. The Bochum autonomous vehicle test with technology partner Loxo continues, though Bauer now sees more promise in moving goods between sites than in driving to customers' doors.

🛍️ Wolt adds household items, organic supermarkets, beauty and fashion

Wolt spent August signing up new categories. The biggest stretch is Mömax: around 4,500 home, kitchen and household products are orderable now from eight of the furniture chain's German stores, with a nationwide rollout to 27 locations planned for the autumn and the range growing toward 5,000 items.

In Sweden, Finland and Norway, Lyko brought more than 72,000 beauty and personal care products from over 1,000 brands to Wolt. Nordic customers are buying beauty through the app order roughly once a month, and health and beauty is now one of its three fastest-growing retail categories alongside electronics and pet supplies. In Munich, slow-luxury label Hacoy put nearly its whole range on Wolt, keeping its showroom for pickup, fitting and exchanges. Founder Maximilian Alexander Rupp reckons good clothing should be as easy to get as a good dinner.

Talking about good (homemade) dinner: The Wolt Bio Market launched on 24 August with 15 locations across eight cities, giving every existing Wolt Market a companion organic store carrying up to 1,800 products, with Alnatura as the anchor brand and regional dairies, butchers and bakeries filling out the rest. A week earlier, organic chain SuperBioMarkt put one Düsseldorf store on the platform, a pilot both sides want to extend across its 24 stores if it performs.

Taken together with the Power pilot in Norway and MediaMarktSaturn's launch in Germany, the pattern is consistent: Wolt is signing retailers across categories where the basket is small enough to fit on a bike, and the purchase is urgent enough to pay for speed.

🚁 Amazon and Uber expand their drone reach

Amazon wants to take Prime Air from a handful of metro areas to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of 2026, a sixfold jump that would put drone delivery in reach of tens of millions of customers. It already runs thousands of flights a day, with Georgia, Ohio, Illinois, Idaho and New York next on the list. Drone delivery is free for Prime members on orders over $50, $2.99 below that, and $4.99 without Prime, which is Amazon treating aircraft as a normal delivery option rather than a premium novelty. Eligible orders cover more than 60% of what customers buy most often.

Uber announced a partnership and a strategic investment in Zipline, putting their drones inside the Uber Eats app. First flights come later this year in Dallas and Houston, where Zipline already runs consumer delivery, with dozens more U.S. cities planned after that. The joint ambition is one million drone deliveries a day by the end of 2029.

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🤖 How MotionTools is shifting from supporting the work to doing the work

Wondering what we have been up to? Here is a quick update about how MotionTools is shifting from supporting the work to doing the work:

The software as a service (SaaS) space has been discussing how AI makes software and especially vertical SaaS (think: „operating system for XYZ“) go from being a system of record to a system of action.

The typical software system was basically a more sophisticated Excel sheet in the sense that it was primarily storing data and then added some validation and a bit of logic. Data was available partially just for reference and partially for „later use“ for example as part of a manually managed process. In our space, this could mean that a customer entered their request via a web interface, a dispatcher then manually managed everything afterwards, and once a month the data was used to create an invoice.

In a world of AI and Agents, this is typically not good enough anymore. Users expect to move up the ladder: Basically from manually planning tours and writing invoices to managing an agent that does this automatically.

At MotionTools, we have a great example for this: Tour building and driver assigning. While these features can be used „by hand“, our larger customers typically automate this away but keep control over the rules. Especially when the speed of delivery is high (think: drop-off within 30 minutes after order creation), automating the full dispatch process is anyhow almost the only feasible option.

If you run your business on MotionTools, you can define your own rules, build your own processes, but then have MotionTools execute them autonomously. This leaves more room for performance management and optimization initiatives rather than being stuck in the daily operations.

We used to call this "stacking" now we call it „agentic dispatching“ ;)

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🤝 Community Update

📆 Events in September

From 15.–17.09. we'll be at Expopharm in Munich, Europe's leading trade fair for the pharmacy market. Pharmacy is currently one of the fastest-growing categories in German e-commerce, but it's pretty fragmented. According to ABDA, almost all German pharmacies run a Botendienst, and pharmacy staff handle around 300,000 deliveries a day, most of it organised store by store with their own drivers and their own routes. That's a lot of same-day volume moving without shared infrastructure behind it, which is exactly the gap our courier platform NOW.delivery is built to close.

Marian will be on site for the fair and meeting customers around it. If you'll be in Munich that week, reach out to Marian on LinkedIn to meet for a chat.

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🦾 Shipping better technology for a world in Motion

Feature highlight: Generic Notes

Admins and org managers can now leave free-text notes on user profiles: drivers, customers, org managers, and other admins. Drivers and customers can write notes on their own profiles too, from the driver app or the Dashboard. Visibility is set per note. When you write one, you choose the roles that may read it: a note on a driver can stay between admins, include the managers of that driver's organization, or include the driver themselves.