Tesco delivers a million orders in one week

An impressive record for Tesco: the British supermarket chain is the first to deliver a million grocery orders in one week. The retailer hired 16,000 additional employees to cope with the surge in orders due to the corona crisis.

Ten million items in one day

Tesco is the first food retailer in British history to have delivered a million orders in one week. The supermarket chain reached that milestone last week: last Tuesday alone, its employees picked ten million items, the highest number ever in a day.

Tesco has had to invest heavily in order to be able to deal with this extraordinary surge: since the start of the corona outbreak, the chain has recruited 16,000 new employees, including 12,000 new order pickers and 4,000 drivers. This has dramatically increased delivery capacity, from around 600,000 deliveries at the start of the pandemic to a million per week now.

Doubling capacity

That is still not enough for Tesco: the British market leader now aims for a weekly capacity of 1.2 million orders, doubling capacity compared to before the crisis. “Now, more than ever, it’s important that we do everything we can to help people access food, especially our most vulnerable customers”, online managing director Chris Poad told Charged Retail.

The British government also confirmed this weekend that there is still not enough capacity to meet demand during the corona lockdown. Supermarkets would therefore add 300,000 extra delivery slots in the coming weeks. Across the industry, delivery slots have increased from 2.1 million to 2.6 million since the start of the lockdown.