Sainsbury’s opens DC for online grocery orders in London

Laid out in aisles, like an enormous supermarket, the online fulfilment centre in East London is 185,000 sq ft and has the capacity to fulfil 25,000 customer orders per week. The chilled picking area alone is ten times the size of an average Sainsbury’s convenience store. Once Sainsbury’s colleagues have picked orders from the shelves they are transferred to a giant automated system, the first of its kind in the UK. The automated system operates 1.5km of conveyor belts which can carry over 7,000 crates per hour to Sainsbury’s vans.

To ensure its fleet of over 160 vans make deliveries on time, day and night, the site has its own fuel pumps and van servicing area. 

Nearly 500 people have already been recruited to work at the centre and Sainsbury’s expects to recruit another 430 colleagues by 2020

Clodagh Moriarty, Sainsbury’s director of online said: “Operating day and night, this state-of-the-art centre, with its cutting edge technology will enable us to handle exceptional volumes at high speed.

“The additional capacity provided by the centre means that, working with our 30 London stores which pick online orders, we’ll be able to keep up with demand for our service in London, which we expect to double over the next eight years.”