Company Facts
Stores
At Asda, we have more than 145,000 dedicated Asda colleagues serving more than 18 million customers who shop in our stores every week.
Our estate has a range of formats including our largest Supercentres and Superstores, as well as our smaller convenience size Supermarkets. We also have our dedicated Asda Living stores across the UK.
Supercentres
Supercentres are our largest stores offering our extended range across food, George and non-food, often supported by partnership offers and an extended range of services such as banks, photo printing specialists and dry cleaners. Milton Keynes is our largest store measuring more than 100,000 sq.ft.
Superstores
Superstores are our most common format, accounting for the majority of stores in our estate. Superstores offer a large fresh food offer alongside a Pharmacy, Optician, larger George and non-food offers. Each store is planned to meet the needs of the community it serves.
Supermarkets
These are our smallest stores and are deployed across the UK, from Newquay to our most northerly store in Tain, Scotland. Our supermarket format focuses on food and convenience, as well as offering essential non-food items. You can Click & Collect from all Asda Supermarkets.
Asda Living
Asda Living stores are dedicated to George and non-food products, offering a range of George Home, Fashion and general merchandise to our customers.
Petrol Filling Stations
Our Petrol Filling Stations offer both pay-at-pump and pay-at-kiosk services, as well as a small convenience store in some locations that provides customers with a variety of food to go, and travel friendly products.
George
Launched in 1989, George is now sold in over 560 stores and through George.com, which is one of the fastest growing online fashion businesses serving over 800,000 customers a week.
George, exclusively at Asda, has helped to lead the changing face of British fashion over the past three decades, and we are incredibly proud that our customers have helped us to become one of the largest fashion retailers in Britain.
George has a reputation for quality, style and value. We strive to save our customers money and to offer the best value, affordable and inspirational clothing for their family.
As a business we recognise the importance of ethical sourcing and protecting the environment, and we always aim to do the right thing. To meet our commitment, we employ a team of ethics specialists, both at our headquarters in the UK and on the ground in the countries where our clothes are produced to ensure continuous progress towards our goals, including monitoring results of independent audits.
George Home launched in 2014, focusing on the same pillars that have become synonymous with the George brand for over three decades - quality, style and value.
Online & Mobile
Asda launched its Grocery Home Shopping in 1997 with a purely food focus. This changed in 2008 when non-food was introduced to the network and eight years on 98 per cent of homes in the UK are served by www.asda.com and www.george.com.
Grocery Click and Collect was launched in 2011 and has grown to more than 15 million orders a year. We now have 650 sites, including 614 stores and 46 remote sites, and same day collection accounts for 30 per cent of all Click and Collect orders.
We also have a mobile app available on Apple and Android devices that enables customers to enjoy a rich, immersive shopping experience. In March 2014, we built a shopping list feature which allows customers to build their shopping list at home, helping them budget and helping them not to forget items whilst shopping, before ticking items off as they shop in store.
The app is designed to help with customer’s budgeting – by providing a running total of how much their shopping will cost. It also adds a layer of convenience to creating shopping lists as customers can use voice recognition, text or scan bar codes throughout the week.
On Android we launched an integrated recipes experience, allowing customers to browse our catalogue of recipes and instantly add them to their online basket or shopping list with one tap.
We have built best-in-class analytics into our apps to enable us to better understand customer usage and behaviour whilst using the app, enabling us to make more effective changes to the app in future.
Logistics Services
Asda Logistics Services is a hub of activity for our business. Our distribution operation includes 42 operations nationwide including twenty food depots, three clothing centres, two ambient GM hubs, two import centres, one national sortation centre, five dot.com fulfilment centres and nine ASCs.
We deliver to every shop across five store formats as well as delivering parcels to customers’ homes and to store for Click and Collect.
We process a high volume of product – in 2021 we delivered 1.5 billion cases. With such large numbers to manage, we have more than 12,500 colleagues working across our distribution function..
As our business has grown so has our transportation. In 2021, we increased our bio-gas HGV fleet to 342 vehicles and invested in six biogas stations, giving Asda the largest biogas powered HGV fleet in the UK. Our aim is to operate almost 1,000 biogas trucks and invest in 10 further biogas stations by 2024, as we complete the programme.
At the end of 2015, we launched Asda toyou, which was the UK’s first end-to-end parcel solution which uses minute-by-minute tracking and allows consumers to return or collect purchases from third party online retailers at more than 600 Asda stores. Parcels can also be collected and sent from Asda forecourts and collection points across the country.
Asda’s toyou service has grown to serve millions of customers and in 2021, moved over 19 million parcels, offering customers a choice of more than 140 third party partners to order, pick up and return through their local Asda store. Customers can now use a fully automated tower to collect and return parcels at 25 stores, through the use of QR code technology.
IPL
International Procurement & Logistics (IPL) was launched in 2004 and became part of the Asda family in 2009.
As Asda’s supply chain partner, IPL’s role is to improve the shopping experience of Asda customers by driving great value, quality, and availability of products.
IPL run the whole produce retail business for ASDA, eliminating the need for produce specific buyers. They are one of the largest importers of fresh produce into the UK, with a network of suppliers and farmers all over the world.
As well as fruit and vegetables, they also source houseplants and flowers, nuts and dried fruit, wine as well as cooked meats and bacon via their subsidiary companies, Forza and Kober.
They procure everything from South African citrus fruits, to British strawberries, Australian Chardonnay, to Kenyan flowers. The team work closely with farmers and suppliers to ensure products meet customer demands, providing freshness and great quality for the best price.
GEC
In 2014 Walmart opened a cutting-edge technology centre at Asda’s head office in Leeds, which would enable a more efficient and streamlined service for its online customers worldwide. The centre is the first of its kind in the UK and enables Asda and parent, Walmart to better monitor all traffic and interactions with its global websites 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The mission control operations hub, or NOC as it is known in the industry, coordinates with centres in Silicon Valley, California and Bangalore, India to monitor 11 of Walmart’s existing websites, including Asda.com and George.com, as well as Walmart’s online operations in Mexico and Canada. Each centre monitors the network for an eight-hour period before handing over to the next centre in sequence - building a 24-hour operating system that truly ‘follows the sun’.
The new system enables Asda and Walmart to identify and address any issues with its websites five times faster than before, helping the companies to deliver a better and more efficient customer experience.
The opening of the centre today generated 14 new roles in Leeds, building on Walmart’s existing 2,500-strong Global E-commerce team.