Winning the Online Grocer 33 is a full circle moment for Nani Kanakam, who began his career with Sainsbury’s in 2020 as an online general assistant.
In that time, he’s experienced several areas of the business as a customer and trading manager, a convenience store manager for two stores at once, and as a food manager in Richmond, where none other than Sainsbury’s CEO Simon Roberts was one of his regulars.
But as deputy manager of the Beckton Superstore, Kanakam has returned to his online roots, with the supermarket operating as Sainsbury’s largest online delivery hub.
He tells The Grocer how the team runs a successful online operation on such a large scale, the importance of availability and how the store looks to “win at Christmas”.
Just how big is your online operation? We have around 585 colleagues working every week in the shop; 380 work within our online operation and of those, 170 are drivers. We deliver in around 50 vans to most of the central London postcodes. We can go as local as possible, we can deliver to Tower Bridge which is as central London as can be, and all the way up to Romford.
What’s your clientele like and how does that impact how you run the store? As well as being one of the biggest online operations, we have thousands of customers walking into the store. If you look at where the store is located, we have a variety of diverse customers. We also have a diverse set of colleagues, so we can understand customer behaviour, and it helps us to know what to prioritise. Right now, Diwali is coming up so we will prioritise that before Halloween. Beckton is like a store of its own; it’s very unique within Sainsbury’s.
How do you strike the balance between online and in-store in terms of minimising disruption on the shop floor or impacting service? An online operation of this size works predominantly because of strategic planning. We have a four-hour window before store opening to pick items for online customers. This morning alone, they picked around 56,000 items. In the same four hours we must get the shop ready for walk-in customers, so it’s always busy and everyone plays their part.
You scored full marks on availability. How often how do you make substitutions? Any funny stories? In this store, we’re delivering one of the company’s top availability metrics. We constantly monitor our substitutions, and we have had some funny stories, especially at Christmas, where a customer asked for a mince pie and they’ve been given a muffin. But we do always try to give the closest match as possible and out of around 57,000 items that we’ve picked, we might be substituting about 300. It’s always worth the constant coaching around substitution appropriateness and we always go with sizing first, rather than going with a different product. If the customer has requested a single lime, why not give them a pack of five limes rather than giving them a lemon?
How is shopper behaviour changing online? I’ve been seeing a big difference because of Occasions by Sainsbury’s (the supermarket’s made-to-order party food). Customers are no longer just ordering the food for their day-to-day life but are also ordering more often for occasions.
What has Sainsbury’s introduced recently to improve the online shopping experience? Shoppers are really loving Nectar Prices. Our recent 50% off veg deal was really popular, and it pushes customers towards online because they can see all the promotions in advance on their handset rather than waiting to come into store. You can also see all those prices put together online, which makes a really big impact to the overall shopping experience.
Have you started booking in Christmas slots yet? Christmas slots go live on 23 October. Last year, we delivered around 4,500 orders - the same volume of what we would for the whole week - in the four days of Christmas trade. Last year, we did not fail on any turkey orders so every customer who ordered a turkey from Sainsbury’s Beckton got it on the table. Things like that make you feel like you won at Christmas.
Successful online operations require excellent teamwork. Where do you think your team excels? We start every single day with team huddles. For online orders specifically, we always say when you’re shopping for the customer, you do the shopping as if you were doing it for yourself. At Beckton, everything is done with care.
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