Waitrose’s 50% rise in deliveries sets up a titanic clash with M&S
SUPERMARKET giant Waitrose has thrown down the gauntlet to rival Marks & Spencer with a sudden 50 per cent surge at its online delivery service – five months before the pair embark on an historic battle for shoppers.
Waitrose bosses revealed for the first time the furious behind-thescenes work the company is doing to ramp up its online business.
Ben Stimson, the 48-year-old executive in charge of Waitrose. com, told The Mail on Sunday its response to the coronavirus lockdown has been so rapid that the £6.4billion chain is now processing almost 100,000 orders a week.
That had been the target set for September, when it will sever its 18-year long partnership with delivery service Ocado, meaning Waitrose has accomplished a five-month business plan in four weeks.
In September, Ocado will switch to delivering Marks & Spencer products while Waitrose will ship its food only in Waitrose.com vans.
Stimson said Waitrose is adding 24 extra shops to its ordering service, taking the total to 184 out of 338 stores where orders can also be collected.
He said the firm is also preparing to unveil a second London delivery depot in Enfield next month, which will add another 10 per cent to overall capacity.
It has 940 delivery vans and will add another 400 by the end of the year.
Waitrose, part of the employeeowned John Lewis Partnership, said preparation for the split began a year ago and has left it well placed to respond to the spike in orders triggered by the lockdown.
Stimson said: ‘What the crisis has done has allowed us to test more quickly than I would ever have thought possible that we are able to operate at that scale. And we are.
‘At the beginning of the year we started with a focus on September. So, while none of us saw the crisis coming, we went into this with some momentum. Now we’re doing 50 per cent more orders than we were the week before the virus hit.’
Stimson said Waitrose is preparing for customers to shift from the Ocado-M&S service from September onwards.
The demand has seen orders rise to 11 per cent of Waitrose revenue compared with just 5 per cent a month ago when the crisis took hold.
The company is shipping 35 per cent of its orders to vulnerable customers – a service which launched just three weeks ago – and the figure is rising.
Stimson and other food bosses say the initial surge in demand at grocery chains – driven largely by stockpiling – has slowed. But a report circulated by Supermarket Income REIT, a supermarket property firm advised by former Sainsbury’s chief executive Justin King, predicts the food industry could net another £15billion this year as shoppers consume extra food and drink bought from supermarkets instead of eating out in restaurants or drinking in pubs.
Sources said investors had piled into Supermarket Income REIT’s £75million share placing which was launched in recent days. The company had already seen strong demand more than a week before the fundraise was supposed to close, sources told The Mail on Sunday.
Stimson said he expected the surge in online demand would return to more ‘normal levels’.
‘I think it would be self-delusion to say the levels of online shopping that we’ve seen are going to stay.’