Ocado and French supermarket group Casino have unveiled plans to develop e-commerce logistics warehouses for all grocery retailers in France as part of an extension to their current partnership into a new joint venture.
The two firms said they believed there is “significant and growing demand for online grocery services across the French market”, creating a major opportunity to leverage their combined expertise, including Ocado’s UK experience providing multi-retailer customer fulfilment centres (CFCs).
Alongside the JV, Ocado’s Solutions technology unit will offer its automated fulfilment and software solutions to all grocery retailers in the French market, with its platform capacity in the future CFCs available to multiple retailers, including Casino.
Casino will also expand its deployment of Ocado’s in-store fulfilment solution across the French company’s Monoprix stores.
Ocado CEO Tim Steiner said the extension of the partnership, which dates to back to 2017 and is operational in Ile-de-France, would support expansion across the country at a time when the online grocery channel had reached an inflection point, with a huge rise in demand for efficient e-commerce propositions.
“This announcement marks a deepening of the relationship between Groupe Casino and Ocado Group, and it will further support the capital-light expansion of our partnership into other French regions. For the first time, it will also open up the whole of the French grocery market to Ocado’s solutions,” he said.
Jean-Charles Naouri, CEO of Groupe Casino, added: “After having experienced the success of the Ocado solution with Monoprix Plus, Casino Plus and Naturalia Marché Bio, the French consumers will be able to benefit from new, even more efficient e-commerce services, making their daily needs even easier.”
The two companies said they did not expect any initial capital cost in creating the joint venture.
