jxmatthews

Hi, thanks for your question.

The article you link to contains a number of significant factual errors. You’ll note at the top of the Guardian article it now says that “This article is the subject of a legal complaint from Ocado” - which is from Ocado Retail Ltd, our JV retailer, so I can’t comment on the specifics of the article at the moment.

What I will say however is that we have a long and proud record of looking after our grocery delivery drivers, our “Customer Service Team Members” as we call them. They are much more than just drivers, they are the only Ocado employees our retail customers will meet, and they represent the amazing customer service we offer.

To my knowledge we have always paid our drivers significantly more than minimum wage, and offered benefits packages well above market norms (e.g. inc. share options, health insurance etc). They do a very difficult job and they do it brilliantly. All colleagues also benefit from our union recognition agreement with USDAW.

A very small number of our deliveries (<1%) were until recently carried out by a third party. These delivery arrangements were on a ‘fee per delivery’ basis. Driver pay varied depending on the acceptance and fulfillment of jobs, and the average driver pay for these deliveries was approx £12 per hour, above the London living wage of £10.85 an hour.

Since this article was published we have offered all of these drivers a job working for Ocado as employees on the terms I mention above.

Hi, I’m personally writing the answers to all the questions, but I do have some help from our comms team who are fact checking me, keeping an eye on incoming questions and keeping me on the straight and narrow!

This is not sponsored at all. A Tom Scott video on our automated warehouses went viral in July: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/oe97r8/how\_many\_robots\_does\_it\_take\_to\_run\_a\_grocery/

We saw hundreds of great questions in the comments section and thought we could have a go at answering some of them here.

Thanks for your question.

In terms of the quality of the products that go to customers, we have a few different approaches.

Firstly, unlike a store we don’t have to deal with customers who have prodded and poked the produce before you’ve got there. Our automation is generally pretty kind to the produce so we keep damage in our facilities to a minimum.

Secondly, we have a tight feedback loop with customers, so if there is a quality issue with a particular supplier we can act on it quickly.

Lastly, as far as our UK retail business is concerned (I can’t speak for our other clients) there’s a huge focus on the quality of product that comes in to us. We can give the suppliers live data above, we can sample on the way in, we can audit and sample everything at various points in our operation, and we can audit the suppliers themselves.

At the moment we are not focusing on using AI to recognise e.g. a good mango. We want them good on the way in and we want to avoid doing them any damage while they’re in our hands.

Hi, this is not sponsored AMA. A Tom Scott video on our automated warehouses went viral in July. We saw hundreds of great questions in the comments section and thought we could have a go at answering some of them here. https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/oe97r8/how\_many\_robots\_does\_it\_take\_to\_run\_a\_grocery/

Thanks for your question.

There are some complexities to this answer, but in general our model is one where the platform that we are providing to each of our 10 clients does not store their customer databases - our clients own and store that. If customer personally identifiable information is ever ‘at rest’ in our platform, it is encrypted and we do not have direct access to the key. Our clients maintain their own customer databases using technology they have procured, and feed us the information we need as we need it in order to orchestrate deliveries to their customers.

This obviously does not guarantee end to end security, but it is a good model that makes accountability for protecting consumer data very clear.

If you are a customer in France at the moment, and you are shopping on Monoprix’s online shopping service, your data is owned and stored by Groupe Casino themselves.