Analysis: Does challenger Takeoff Technologies threaten Ocado’s dominance?
The emergence of Takeoff Technologies, a grocery ecommerce pretender, has driven Ocado shares down and rattled investors. Retail Week looks at whether the new kid on the block could take the UK grocery pureplay’s delivery crown.
US-based grocery ecommerce start-up Takeoff Technologies revealed it had struck a partnership with Canadian supermarket giant Loblaw earlier this week. The news followed another overseas deal Takeoff pulled off in August with Australian grocer Woolworths.
Takeoff, based in Boston and founded in 2016 by two Harvard Business School alumni with Wall Street experience, is on the surface a similar grocery ecommerce business to UK giant Ocado, in that it uses automation to fulfil ecommerce grocery deliveries.
However, whereas Ocado has invested heavily in its own intellectual property and seeks to make deliveries from large, automated customer fulfilment centres, Takeoff’s proposition is smaller in scale.
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