OCADOLIFE 03 - September 2008

When we started Ocado eight years ago, our vision was to create an online grocery business like no other, built from scratch and centred entirely around our customers’ needs. Quite honestly, everyone from our friends and family to the bosses of most UK grocers thought we’d lost our marbles.

But we knew that it could work. So while our competitors kept on picking their online orders from their supermarket shelves, we built a dedicated warehouse to make sure we could guarantee the quality and freshness our customers demand.

After all, which would you prefer: a piece of fruit that has been prodded and poked by countless shoppers, or one that whizzes from supplier to kitchen table and is touched only when it’s placed in your order?

We average far fewer missing items and substitutions than our competitors too. That’s because every item in our warehouse is directly linked to our website, so you can’t order anything that we don’t have in stock.

We also use dazzling technical wizardry to keep a close eye on our stock levels, which helps us to have the lowest food waste of any food retailer in the world today. And by driving down our costs, we can pass the savings on to you -- helping us to offer lower prices than Waitrose on thousands of household brands like Seeds of Change and Method.

This innovative way of working also means that we’re able to keep our environmental impact as low as possible. Remember, we don’t have lots of big supermarkets with open chillers to keep the food cold, heating to keep customers warm and lots of nasty refrigerants being pumped around. We just have a warehouse and green vans that keep up to 40 cars off the road every day.

In fact, we’ve just had some clever environmental consultants come and measure our carbon footprint. We’ll let you know when the results are published, but the whisper is that shopping at Ocado is actually greener than walking to the supermarket. And that’s something our children can appreciate too.

In fact, we’ve just had some clever environmental consultants come and measure our carbon footprint, and guess what, it’s good news. They’ve told us that shopping at Ocado is officially as green as walking to the supermarket. And that’s something our children will be sure to appreciate too.

Neill,

Ocado Co-Founder