sainsbury's delivery

Growth at Sainsbury’s online appears to have slowed. Why? The market has slowed. But we’ve got double-digit growth.

You’ve been in this role for a year. What’s been your focus? My no1 priority has been focusing on things our customers wanted us to improve.

Such as what? We’ve reduced the cost of delivery so we are in line with the market. We’ve just introduced rolling half-hour delivery slots. Another important initiative has been the ‘green van’ opportunity. If we have a van in the customer’s neck of the woods, we’ll let them know.

What about the back end? We are placing as much emphasis on the back end as on the delivery. One of the biggest issues is around freshness. All our pickers are now trained to pick the items with the longest shelf life. And three months ago, we introduced a money-back guarantee if you’re not happy about the sell-by dates on your delivery.

Isn’t picking orders in store a disadvantage? From a cost position it makes a lot more sense to use your existing capital assets. The metrics we can deliver from our stores are extremely high. Having said that a dark store will open at the end of this year. We also launched 25 click & collect outlets last year, and will open another 15 over the course of the next few weeks. We will have 100 by the year-end.

How’s the integration of the GM site going? We’re adding more GM lines all the time. We now have 4,500 and have recently added greetings cards, towels and bedding and more flowers.

Why so many carrier bags? We’re trialling the functionality to do bagless delivery. The takeup is high. I would expect most of our customers will opt in.