Tesco is continuing the expansion of its online food-shopping infrastructure. The supermarket giant has just got planning permission for yet another online food-shopping distribution centre that will operate 24 hours a day.
The planned development is on a 12-acre site at Milton Hill, near Abingdon, in Oxfordshire. Tesco said a new depot would enable it to improve its service to customers in Oxfordshire and further afield.
The new delivery centre will mainly fulfil online shopping orders to homes within a 45-minute drive of the warehouse.
The current approval will last for five years. A previous approval for the same site was secured in 2006 but expired in 2011 without works commencing. If the centre goes ahead as planned it could generate 500 full-time-equivalent posts, with a floor area of about 120,000 sq ft and with about 480 parking spaces – 260 for staff and 220 for delivery vans.
Tesco is reckoned to be the only supermarket to have increased its share of the online grocery market in the past year. It is now said to account for almost 50p of every £1 spent on online food shopping in the UK.
Ocado , Asda , Sainsbury and Waitrose have all either lost market share or remained at a standstill in the year to date. Overall, Tesco’s like-for-like sales struggled in Q1 this year, but online food sales bucked that trend.
