Creating a market-leading, multi-channel grocery service

Across all its ventures, the Co-operative Group’s mission is to build a better society by excelling in everything they do. With more than 3,000 food stores, Co-operative Food is the UK’s fifth largest grocer.

At the time, the retailer had 6% market share in the highly competitive UK market. Sky-rocketing consumer online spend and a move to digital by the competition required the Co-operative Food to rethink its digital strategy.

As part of their transformational strategy they decided to create a market-leading, convenient multi-channel grocery service.

A significant portion of the Co-operative Food’s revenue is through products that are on deals, so the team decided to give them as much exposure as possible. The engagement started with ThoughtWorks bringing in fresh ideas for an inception, which resulted in a pool of 16 ideas about how to start the Co-operative Food’s digital journey. The team chose to start with ‘Delightful Deals’, an automated deals platform, targeting the mobile channel.

User experience design and exploratory testing were core to the engagement and allowed for a product that speaks to the Co-operative Food’s customer’s needs and preferences when shopping for deals.

The minimum viable product (MVP) of the mobile website went live in 12 weeks, letting customers access and explore on-going deals and promotions using their mobile devices.

Moving from paper-based deal promotions to pushing deals to market through the mobile app enabled the Co-operative to reduce cycle time from months to days.

The ‘Delightful Deals’ project is only the start to the Co-operative Food’s digital journey. The infrastructure that was built will support future digital initiatives across the group and help drive market share.

Working with ThoughtWorks allowed us to rapidly identify a clear customer need in the convenience sector, design a solution and get this to market in an incredibly short space of time. Not only what we have delivered, but how we delivered it is a demonstration of a new way of working, which is essential if we are to continue to meet our customer’s evolving needs.
Dane Stanley

Group Head of Digital Marketing and Social Media

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