Over the past year, Woolworths’ on-demand delivery platform, Dash, achieved impressive sales growth of 71%. In addition to this, it improved its operational performance, with 95% of Dash orders delivered on-time or early – a 10% improvement on last year.
The expansion of Woolies Dash has created an additional 2 200 jobs across the value chain in the past 12 months alone, a meaningful boost towards job creation in South Africa. In line with the Woolworths Good Business Journey, the Group’s pioneering sustainability programme, Woolies Dash saved 38 tonnes of paper through the use of its smaller format delivery bags – another step towards Woolworths’ vision to be one of the world’s most responsible retailers.
Woolies Dash remains the only on-demand grocery delivery offering in South Africa to guarantee an unbroken cold chain. The cold chain is essential for maintaining the quality and safety of perishable foods, ensuring our customers receive safe, fresh, and the highest-quality food products they are accustomed to finding in Woolworths stores.
A key development in the Woolies Dash journey has been the introduction of its first dark store, situated in the Cape Town CBD and servicing the city bowl and surrounding areas. A dark store is a store that is not open to the public and is solely dedicated to fulfilling orders that are placed online.
“Investing in dark stores is testament to our focus on creating a future-fit omni-channel offering, that leverages and transforms existing assets to continuously improve our customer’s experience,” said Liz Hillock, Woolworths Director of Online & Mobile.
The dark store in Cape Town has had a significant impact on product availability for online orders in the relevant area. Woolies Dash orders are usually fulfilled via local Woolworths stores, which means online orders compete with in-store shoppers. The dark store eliminates this competition, and customers enjoy quicker delivery, thanks to a dedicated environment designed to be online-first. Excitingly, more Woolies Dash dark stores will be rolling out across the country soon.
It is evident the hard work is paying off. Woolworths recently ranked as the stand-out performer in terms of net sentiment scores according to DataEQ’s South African Retail Sentiment Index, which showcases consumer perceptions of the nation’s top grocery listed retailers as expressed on social media. Woolworths scored 19.5% versus the industry average of 8.8%.
