Ocado has said firefighters attended a fire at its customer fulfilment centre (CFC) in Erith overnight, marking the second time a depot has suffered a blaze this year.

The grocery delivery and technology company said the fire at its Erith CFC “occurred just outside the building in a hopper containing waste packaging”. London Fire Brigade was in attendance and the fire has been extinguished.

The retailer said “no part of the material handling equipment” was affected in the blaze, though the depot had to be evacuated and “there was some disruption to picking and some customer orders have had to be cancelled”.

Ocado said the “fire suppression measures in place performed as intended” and the fire did not spread to the main building of the Erith depot.

This is the second time in a year that fire has broken out at an Ocado CFC.

In February, a fire gutted the etailer’s facility in Andover, Hampshire. The disaster wiped around 1.2% off of Ocado’s sales growth for the first quarter of the year and around 3% in the second quarter.

Ocado eventually announced that an “electrical fault with one of the battery charging units” on one of the picking robots had caught alight, which caused the warehouse roof to collapse and resulted in “sustained damage to the majority of the building and its contents”.

Topics