Ocado, Casino extend deal, create new joint venture

UK online grocer and technology group Ocado and France’s Groupe Casino on Thursday unveiled plans to develop logistics warehouses for French retailers as they signed a deal to extend their current partnership.

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 joint venture, Ocado 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 grocery retailers, including Casino.

Ocado will also deploy its in-store fulfilment solution across the French company's Monoprix stores, the companies said.

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 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.

Both companies said they did not expect any initial capital cost in creating the joint venture.