At Sleepy Hollow’s New DeCicco & Sons, Tally Makes Sure The Shelves Are Stocked

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Tally the robot rests between shifts at De Cicco's & Sons

June 28, 2025

By Barrett Seaman—

Tall and erect with a soft burgundy screen explaining that her role is to “check shelf inventory,” Tally the robot slips along aisle 4 at DeCicco & Sons fancy new store at Sleepy Hollow’s Edge-on-Hudson. Her movement creates a barely perceptible whirring sound, and when she has a message, she beeps. If any one of the store’s dozens of staffers on duty that day happens to be in her path while restocking a shelf, Tally glides politely around him–just doing her job.

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There’s no escaping robots in our lives. They are welding chassis in auto plants, vacuuming our living rooms, performing brain surgery and zapping germs in our hospitals (see https://thehudsonindependent.com/phelps-memorial-hospital-acquires-germ-killing-robots/). And now they are patrolling our supermarkets to make sure the shelves are stocked with what customers want.

At the Sleepy Hollow DeCicco & Sons, that last job falls to a 30-pound stick figure resembling an upright vacuum cleaner that rolls up and down the aisles checking on inventory, which in DeCicco’s case means monitoring some 35,000 items distributed across 50,000 square feet of floor space.

If a can of Amy’s “No Chicken Noodle” soup is not to be found on its designated shelf in aisle 4, Tally notifies the store’s purchasing team. It could be the store is out of stock, in which case more can be ordered, or it could be that the cans were just misplaced. In either case, the human staff can then move quickly to rectify the situation.

Tally (as in the verb “to count,” or the noun “amount”) is the product of Simbe Robotics, a decade-old San Francisco-based company that supplies dozens of chain stores in nine countries, according to its Senior Vice President for Marketing Caitlin Allen. Tally, she says, is the world’s first inventory management robot capable of analyzing product movement as well as placement, relieving store workers of the tedious aspect of inventory management. While store employees at the Sleepy Hollow store tend to assign Tally as female, Simbe aimed to make their product gender neutral.

Her pronouns notwithstanding, Tally is festooned with cameras that take real-time stock of what’s in stock, compare it with historical data, check to see if pricing changes and promotions have been applied and correct product misplacements where necessary. Tally can also compare sales in one store to sales in others in the chain, helping inventory managers to determine which products they might want to scrap and which they might want to double-down on. Two other DeCicco branches have their own Tally.

As always, there are concerns that robots like Tally threaten the livelihoods of human employees. Caitlin Allen says that “90 percent of our store teams prefer to work with robots.” They not only relieve employees of the physically demanding work of squatting and stretching as they handle stock, notes Ben Saldinger, Simbe’s liaison with DeCicco & Sons, “they allow the staff to focus on customers.” Blue-uniformed DeCicco staffers are both visible and available throughout the Sleepy Hollow store. “Robots,” says Allen, “should be deferential to the needs of humans and supportive such that it is either a positive or a neutral experience.”

The quest for profits and the pressure of competition may threaten that ethos, as it has in other industries. Brick and mortar grocery stores are facing growing competition from online retailers like Amazon Fresh and Fresh Direct.

With AI, the potential to give robots the ability to interact directly with customers may become hard to resist. The retail food producers are already asking whether they can advertise on Tally, but Caitlin Allen says Simbe is resisting that for fear that it would erode trust in the robot’s presumed impartiality

That doesn’t mean Tally can’t make—or at least save—money for stores. Across the grocery industry, which has notoriously narrow margins to begin with, Tally provides most with a minimum two percent sales lift, says Allen. “Most see an average of $200,000 per-store, per-year in savings, she adds. That translates into 20-to-50 hours per week of inventory management rededicated to serving store customers.

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