Chris Conway, Co-op Food’s e-commerce director, promised on 11 February that a rebranded business-to-business (B2B) quick commerce app from the organisation was imminent.
Talking at Retail Week and The Grocer’s Live 2025 event in North London, Conway said Co-op’s Nisa to You app – helping more than 30 of the independent retailers in its network to deliver groceries speedily to customers – was set for relaunch. It was initially unveiled in trial form last summer, enabled by Co-op’s tech stack and with integrations into the same couriers used by the Co-op Food stores.
“We’ll be able to commercialise and operationalise it and go at huge scale,” Conway said at Live 2025.
On 27 February, it all became clear. Co-op announced the launch of Peckish, describing it as a “million-pound rapid delivery grocery app” offering “a technologically advanced service to thousands of independent retailers looking to serve their customers and communities online”.
The new name is incidental – it’s what the tech can help individual stores to achieve that’s important. The has Co-op said Peckish will give small, often family-owned, independent grocery businesses, shops and other co-operative retail societies the chance to provide an online grocery shopping and delivery service using their stores as fulfilment centres.
The retailer stated that it helps these businesses overcome barriers that independent retailers face when moving to sell online, which typically relate to cost, scale and resource. In some cases, it means independents will be able to get goods delivered to their local customers in under 30 minutes.
Co-op, which has rapidly built its own quick commerce proposition in the past five years, with the aim of being a leading grocer in that space, already works with Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats nationwide, as well as Starship Technologies for autonomous robot delivery in some regions. The new Peckish app will mean the independents it owns thanks to its acquisition of symbol group Nisa in 2018 can also offer many of these delivery courier partner options to their customers.
Reinforcing the tech stack
Co-op is making an initial £1m investment for year one on Peckish, and is targeting a sign-up rate of more than 1,000 stores in year one, with potential to treble that by year three.
Peckish will be linked with a retailer’s electronic point of sale (PoS) system, meaning it saves the individual store manual tasks such as pricing and stock control and management. Retailers who sign up to the service have also been promised a range of support including data and insight from Co-op’s quick commerce team, as well as PoS material, window stickers, leaflets, shelf talkers, digital assets, posters and banners.
Matt Hood, Co-op Food managing director, said “consumers’ appetite for a convenient grocery delivery service in as little as 30 minutes from ordering increases almost weekly”.
Hood announced major plans for Co-op growth in January, saying 75 new stores would be opening in 2025, with 80 undergoing refurbishment. A central cog of the work is to “maximise the potential of Co-op’s existing portfolio of properties”, and part of that means strengthening shops’ role in the retailer’s online proposition.
Co-op calls its stores “micro-distribution hubs for its online home delivery operation”, with orders picked fresh in local stores and delivered quickly to ensure its high street shops benefit from online orders.
The retailer said in January that it wants to grow its share of the quick commerce market to over 30%, which is one of the motivating factors behind Peckish.
It has been incrementally reinforcing its tech stack to support this strategy, with a SAP migration completing in June 2024. Eight years previous, Co-op started implementing SAP’s Retail ECC Suite on HANA to drive improvements in product ranging, stock visibility and forecasting across its stores.
More recently, RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud has been put in place which brings Co-op’s ERP into the cloud and streamlines its finance and procurement functions. In addition, an ongoing project with Manhattan Associates is seeing Co-op’s warehouse management systems (WMS) switching over to the supplier’s cloud-based Manhattan Active WMS as part of a move away from datacentre reliance.
Meanwhile, in July 2024, Co-op started work with Walmart Commerce Technologies to implement the US grocery giant’s online fulfilment technology, Store Assist.
The official jargon surrounding the tool is that it “digitises and streamlines online order fulfilment workflows”. What that means in practice is that Co-op can integrate all its third-party delivery partnerships on one platform and device, which is then put in the hands of store staff so they can understand, organise and manage a complex network of couriers turning up at shops to collect online orders throughout the day.
Co-op even announced in September 2024 that some of its city centre stores will offer a 24-hour service, meaning consumers can order goods online for instant delivery at any time of day. The service, it said, could be ideal for shift workers, young families and late-night partygoers.
Faster and better
Co-op’s quick commerce investment and focus is not unique, albeit it is more comprehensive in its offering compared to the wider UK grocery industry.
Tesco has doubled down on its Whoosh rapid delivery service in the last year, with it featuring heavily in the retailer’s national advertising campaigns. Former Deliveroo global head of strategy Francesca Jones arrived in January to lead Whoosh, which contributed significantly to a 10.8% year-over-year (YoY) Tesco online sales rise over Christmas 2024.
Some 1.2 million customers placed orders on this instant delivery offering during the peak period, supported by the expansion of the service which meant it was more accessible at Christmas than before and available up until 24 December.
I speak to my team and say, ‘Don’t worry about the other grocers, see what McDonald’s is doing’ Chris Conway, Co-op Food
Elsewhere, Ocado ramped up its Express It offering in August 2024, allowing its customers to book for same-day delivery up until 11am. One month before, Morrisons expanded its partnership with Just Eat to include on-demand grocery deliveries from its groceries from its supermarkets – in addition to the service from its cafés and Morrisons Daily convenience stores that had been in place since 2022.
And as Co-op launches its B2B app, it’s worth remembering Snappy Shopper is already making waves in this space supporting convenience stores with an online delivery service. In January, it said its weekly trading volumes surged by 42% YOY at the end of 2024, with the platform facilitating more than £14m in monthly transactions during the final quarter.
In December, Snappy Shopper said it was increasing the number of Tesco-owned One Stop stores served by its network to 530, further highlighting the consumer demand for rapid fulfilment from local stores.
What’s behind the innovation?
Talking at Live 2025, Conway gave some deep insight into Co-op’s innovation strategy and how it monitors its competition in the quick commerce space.
“Our competitor set is amazing – it’s a privilege to be in that competitor set,” he said, adding that many of its competitors follow the Co-op with innovation. “Our competitor set in grocery is fantastic at supply chain, getting thousands of products to thousands of locations in the most efficient way possible.”
Intriguingly, it’s an adjacent industry where Conway encourages his team to look for inspiration: “I speak to my team and say, ‘Don’t worry about the other grocers, see what McDonald’s is doing’. Go to some of their new sites and you see they’ve made space for riders, and the way they operate is effectively as a mini fulfilment centre as well as a restaurant. That’s fascinating and the way I see the future of Co-op going.”
When looking at how the Co-op embraces digital and tech-enabled transformation, Conway said the organisation has gotten better over time. In particular, he said the Co-op has approved investment and funding in the past 18 months to do discovery work rather than waiting for a detailed business case.
“Once you’ve done discovery, you’re almost in and it’s too late to back out,” he said, reflecting on the previous methods used by the retailer. “Now we’re prepared to throw some money away and do discovery to realise if it’s something we want to do. And what we realise is that, 95 times out of 100, once we’ve done discovery, it’s the right idea and we go ahead.”
He talked of Co-op now having a “fail-fast mentality”, adding: “It’s been refreshing to be around that mentality; it wasn’t like that when I joined. How we’ve grown up and how the culture has changed is really infectious.”
Conway stated that the Co-op is already benefiting from the SAP migration in terms of how quickly it can introduce new ideas and drive efficiency.
It seems that having a thought-out approach to transformation can also be beneficial in dealing with unexpected burdens. With most retailers voicing concerns about the impact of the October 2024 Budget, which will result in increased employment costs from April in the form of greater National Insurance Contributions (NIC), Conway offered a pragmatic response.
“In business, you have to expect the unexpected,” he said of the budget announcements. “Of course, the incremental costs are always a challenge, but it’s about realising the country is in quite a dilemma in terms of where to get the funding, so something had to give.
“What’s more important is looking at your innovation transformation programme. As long as you have that constant balance of transformation where you’re driving efficiency but driving new business and growth – doing that equally – I think you’re able to ensure you’re able to cope with things like NIC.”
Offering a personal viewpoint, Conway said that he envisions a growth agenda from the UK government coming into force in the second half of the year: “For now, it’s about continuing innovation, doubling down on cost savings, doing the right thing for colleagues and communities, and then hopefully we can put our foot down and support the government’s growth agenda.”
