The Freshest Thing About the World’s Biggest Online Grocer Isn’t Food
Ocado is the world’s largest online grocer, but it’s the firm’s technology that could secure its future.
An employee packs boxes at the Ocado Ltd. distribution center in Hatfield.
Photographer: Jason Alden/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
At Ocado Group Plc’s warehouse in Hatfield, a half-hour north of central London by train, hundreds of red shopping crates wind their way through a labyrinth of conveyor belts.
The plastic crates make a series of pit stops where workers fill them with any of 45,000 different products in the warehouse: corn flakes here, oysters there, bananas farther along. The crated groceries are then loaded into vans in time to make it to homes across Britain within a one-hour window.