Waitrose to open third online centre to boost shopping slots in London

Waitrose is to open a third online fulfilment centre for London as it looks to increase the number of shopping slots available across the capital.

Once the new site is operational, the supermarket will have quadrupled the number of London shopping slots in less than a year.

The facility will create 800 jobs for the local area.

Situated in Greenford, it will be operated with logistics company Wincanton who Waitrose has worked with for 20 years. The new slots could potentially be available as early as December.

Waitrose executive director James Bailey said: “While we’ve already pulled forward our online expansion plans by six months we know there are still lots of people who want to shop online with us and currently can’t. This is especially the case in London, where we’ve seen a significant and prolonged surge in demand for our online offer. This new centre will help us better serve the London area with a much broader range of slots.”

Waitrose.com orders are mostly picked and delivered to customers from a network of Waitrose shops which cover nearly 90% of active UK postcodes. To help meet high demand in London, Waitrose already has dedicated online fulfilment centres in Coulsdon and Enfield which supplement  Waitrose deliveries from selected stores.

The supermarket has more than doubled the weekly slots that customers can book since the start of the year and can now handle more than 150,000 orders each week. It has also more than trebled the size of its Rapid service to 7,000 orders per week in London and Brighton. The service offers up to 25 products for delivery within two hours and has at least 40% of slots reserved for vulnerable customers.