Ocado Retail appoints new chief as online pandemic boom fades

Ocado Retail has appointed Hannah Gibson as its new chief executive, after Mel Smith left the business at the end of August as the pandemic-driven boom enjoyed by the online retailer ended.

The company, a joint venture between Ocado Group and Marks and Spencer, has been run on an interim basis by non-executive director Lawrence Hene since Smith’s departure. Gibson will take over on September 20.

Tim Steiner, chief executive of Ocado Group and chair of the joint venture, said he was confident that Gibson would deliver on Ocado Retail’s growth ambitions “whilst also being able to navigate the nearer-term challenges associated with the macroeconomic environment”.

All supermarkets are suffering from higher costs for food, energy and labour, leaving them with difficult decisions about how much of those costs to absorb and how much to pass on to shoppers.

Ocado has the additional problems of its relatively small size — its national market share is about 2 per cent — and falling average basket sizes as consumers returned to physical stores after shopping online during the pandemic.

Sales at the joint venture dropped 8 per cent in the six months to June. It is due to report on third-quarter trading on September 13.

Gibson is currently chief product officer at Ocado Technology and part of the team that develops and markets Ocado’s proprietary automated grocery picking systems to other supermarkets.

Prior to that she was instrumental in developing Zoom, the Ocado service that competes with start-ups such as Getir, Zapp and Gorillas in the market for ultra-fast grocery delivery. Her first role at Ocado was head of product and merchandising at Ocado Retail, though at that time it was a wholly owned subsidiary of Ocado rather than a joint venture.

She said she was “thrilled to be returning” to the business.

Her appointment means that both the chair and chief executive of the joint venture now come from the Ocado side, whereas Smith had previously worked for M&S. However, M&S chief executive Stuart Machin and finance director Eoin Tonge are both non-executives on the Ocado Retail board.

Machin said her product and customer experience and her working knowledge of Ocado’s technology made her “the ideal candidate” to lead the partnership “into its next phase of growth”.

Despite her recent departure, Smith was last night named the 50th winner of the Bold Woman Award by champagne maker Veuve Clicquot for her “outstanding and inspired” work at Ocado Retail.