Gatik and Loblaw have moved from proving ground to scale-up, inking a five-year expansion that will put 50 autonomous, cold‑chain‑capable box trucks into Loblaw’s Greater Toronto Area distribution network by the end of 2026. The rollout starts with 20 vehicles this year and another 30 next year, and comes alongside a strategic investment in Gatik by the retailer — a package the companies describe as the largest planned autonomous‑truck deployment in North America to date.
Operationally, the Class 6 trucks will run hard — 12 hours a day, seven days a week — ferrying groceries and household goods on repeatable middle‑mile routes to more than 300 Loblaw stores across the region. That duty cycle, paired with fixed pickup and drop‑off points, is designed to keep utilization high and variability low, two levers that matter for trucking economics when you’re measuring payback in hours, not years.
The fleet will launch with safety drivers, then transition to “freight‑only” driverless operations as routes, software, and procedures clear predefined safety gates. The partners say Ontario’s new Automated Commercial Motor Vehicle pilot program — launched August 1 — gives them a provincewide framework to expand beyond surface streets into highway segments as they scale.
Under the agreement, Gatik will deploy trucks equipped with its latest sensor suite and the company’s “Gatik Driver” autonomy stack, including vehicles spec’d for cold‑chain service. For grocers, that matters: temperature control is table stakes for perishable freight, and putting refrigerated medium‑duty AVs on short, frequent shuttles can smooth store replenishment and shrink stockouts without waiting on Class 8, long‑haul autonomy to mature.
Why it matters for fleets: this is a live test of whether autonomous middle‑mile capacity can be bought like any other dedicated service, then densified route by route across a metro. The five‑year horizon and capital alignment — Loblaw is now an investor as well as a customer — should give planners confidence to rework schedules, yard operations, and store labor around higher‑frequency deliveries. If uptime holds at the promised cadence, carriers and private fleets competing for similar B2B shuttle work will feel pressure to match responsiveness and cost per stop.
There’s also a workforce angle. The companies frame the scale‑up as a way to relieve chronic driver shortages on short‑haul, repetitive routes — the very lanes that see the most churn — while redeploying human drivers to higher‑value or longer‑haul assignments. For union and safety stakeholders watching closely, the near‑term reality is supervised operations; the more consequential test will come during the driver‑out phase, when the partners must prove consistent on‑road performance through Ontario’s pilot program oversight.
What to watch next: implementation milestones (how quickly the first 20 trucks hit the road this year), the pace of the safety‑driver drawdown, and whether the partners publish metrics on on‑time performance and incident rates. Also notable will be network design choices — which corridors get highway segments first and how weather hardening looks across a GTA winter — as those decisions will signal how fast similar regional AV freight networks can scale in other Canadian and U.S. metros.
Sources: FreightWaves, Loblaw, Truck News, Trucking Dive, ACT News, CityNews
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