Tesco expands Whoosh one-hour grocery delivery to London and Bristol

The grocery giant has expanded its one-hour offering from a single store in Wolverhampton, adding a further 11 Express stores in London and Bristol. Chief executive Ken Murphy said the trial had provided Tesco with “some very interesting data”.  

Like many other grocers, Tesco has also looked to third party partnerships in this emerging space. It currently has a trial with Deliveroo in 260 of its One Shop stores.  

Murphy described the new rapid grocery delivery space as “a hot market” but said the grocer was very much still in a test-and-learn phase. 

“The truth is that we are not sure yet about the economic proposition and we’re not entirely sure about what the customer need is,” he said. “Is it 10 minutes? Is it half an hour? Is it an hour? 

“I would describe our view on it as we’re very curious about what the proposition could look like. We’re very curious about what the customer need really is and we’re very curious about what a viable economic model could look like.”

Murphy also said Tesco had plans to expand its cashless store trial to a second location open to the public. In partnership with technology company Trigo, Tesco opened its first frictionless c-store at its Welwyn Garden City HQ in 2018. It opened another cashless store in High Holborn, central London, last year that was open to the public.

While Murphy did not give a deadline or location for the next frictionless store, he said Tesco was at an “exciting point where we’re becoming a more digital business”. 

“We’ll open the next store in the coming weeks and months, just to check the formula in a more urban setting,” he said. When asked if the technology used similar machine learning algorithms to Amazon’s, he said they were “similar, but different”.