Waitrose seals online deal with Deliveroo

Supermarket stokes talk of Amazon tie-up with 12-week trial partnership to serve 500,000 homes

Waitrose has struck a deal to sell online groceries through Deliveroo, driving speculation over a possible tie-up with Amazon, which owns a major stake in the takeaway courier. Around 500,000 Waitrose customers will be able to have ready meals, fruit and vegetables, meat, milk and other items delivered in as little as 30 minutes in the trial partnership. Supermarkets are joining a digital “gold rush” after a surge in internet grocery shopping triggered by the Covid-19 lockdown.

WAITROSE has struck a deal to sell online groceries through Deliveroo, driving speculation over a possible game-changing tie-up with Amazon, which owns a major stake in the takeaway courier.

Around 500,000 Waitrose customers will be able to get ready meals, fruit and veg, meat, milk and cleaning goods delivered in as little as 30 minutes through the trial partnership, which will initially run for 12 weeks.

Supermarkets are throwing millions of pounds at a digital gold rush after a surge in internet grocery shopping triggered by Covid-19.

Meanwhile, Dame Sharon White, boss of parent company John Lewis Partnership, is seeking to turn the firm into a digital-first champion with a raft of radical reforms.

Amazon bought 16pc of Deliveroo earlier this year in a contentious deal which was closely vetted by competition watchdogs. The $1.7 trillion (£1.3trillion) US titan is already fighting to expand its foothold in British online food through its Fresh arm, which stocks products from Morrisons, Booths and Whole Foods.

It last month became the first player to offer free delivery to customers using its subscription service Amazon Prime, and is believed to have plans to roll out 30 of its checkout-free “Go” stores across the UK. Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder, is rumoured to have held talks to buy Waitrose in 2018, a claim vehemently denied by John Lewis.

Richard Hyman, a retail analyst, said: “To learn from history, Amazon doesn’t do anything in a frivolous manner. Could I ever see Amazon and Waitrose getting into bed? Definitely.”

Dame Sharon took charge of John Lewis in February and has vowed to turn around the ailing mutual, which was already struggling before Covid hit and was then hammered by lockdown.

She has already shut eight department stores with 1,800 jobs at risk, and outlined a string of new measures aimed at reviving the brand, including turning under-used sites into social housing, opening garden centres and allowing customers to rent furniture rather than buying it.

The Deliveroo deal will initially be offered through shops in Bracknell, Clifton, Surbiton, Cambridge and Notting Hill. It comes a day ahead of the end of a long-running Waitrose relationship with Ocado, which will start stocking Marks & Spencer goods from Tuesday. Waitrose has continued offering groceries directly through its own website.

More than 500 products will be available through Deliveroo, which is considerably less than the 4,000 sold through Ocado.

The trial is designed to complement Waitrose’s “Rapid” service, which has around 23,000 customers following a three-fold spike during the pandemic and delivers in two hours or less.

James Bailey, Waitrose executive director, said the trial had “huge potential”. He added: “We have laid down a marker for our future strategy with the growth of Waitrose.com and Waitrose Rapid, and this gives us another opportunity to give our customers a taste of what the future of convenience shopping could look like for us.”

Online grocery shopping has boomed during lockdown, and the market is expected to grow by more than a third to nearly £17bn this year, according to research firm Mintel.

The shift has triggered a race to conquer market share, with Tesco earlier this week announcing plans to hire an additional 16,000 staff on the back of soaring online sales.

Mr Hyman said: “The pandemic has shaken everything up considerably and introduced loads more people to online shopping.

“In a very short space of time, we’ve seen five years of development concentrated into a matter of weeks.”