M&S and Ocado joint venture goes live

Ocado Retail, the joint venture between M&S and grocery pureplay Ocado, goes live today with M&S offering 6,000 products as well as 800 items from its clothing and home lines.

To match previous Ocado partner Waitrose, M&S has added more than 750 food products to its range and the joint venture pledged “significant investment” to expand delivery capacity by the end of 2021.

In a joint statement to mark the occasion, Ocado and M&S said that “20,000 packets of Percy Pigs” had already been ordered by customers and touted the joint venture’s combined range of 50,000 products as being “double that of the next largest grocery retailer”.

Ocado Retail chief executive Mel Smith said: “Today Ocado Retail are bringing the best to your door with the launch of M&S products exclusively on Ocado.com. This marks the culmination of over a year of hard work by everyone involved and I am so proud of everyone at Ocado Retail and our friends at M&S for such a collaborative partnership.

“We are excited to be bringing the greatest range of products to loyal and new customers across the UK with the winning combination of the country’s fastest growing grocer and the nation’s most beloved food brand. We know this is the start of something special and as shoppers continue to move online at pace, we look forward to what the future holds.”

The joint venture launches more than 18 months after M&S and Ocado struck a £750m deal in February 2019. 

The switchover brings to an end a 20-year delivery partnership between Ocado and Waitrose. 

Ocado founder and chief executive Tim Steiner lashed out at Waitrose in The Sunday Times over the weekend when he claimed the grocer would struggle to make its ecommerce arm work on its own. 

Steiner said: “They [Waitrose] have done an advert saying ‘we’ll take it from here’ or something. Well, they can’t take it from here because they don’t have the technology, the infrastructure or the systems. To put it bluntly, they don’t understand the online market like we do.”

Since agreeing the joint venture, Ocado’s technology Solutions arm has ramped up its international expansion, agreeing partnerships with grocers in Australia and Japan. 

The retailer also opened its first international customer fulfilment centres this year – the first in France for Carrefour, followed by a second in Canada through its partnership with Sobeys.