For many retailers, quick commerce (q-commerce) has been characterised by standalone technology stacks, dedicated fulfilment networks, and outsourced partnerships with third parties. The UK’s largest retailer, Tesco, has taken a markedly different route.
Rather than building a separate rapid delivery operation, the UK’s largest retailer has embedded its rapid delivery service, Whoosh, within its existing digital, fulfilment and store technology platforms. The result – five years from inception – is a proposition that is now accessible to more than 74% of the UK population and processes around 300,000 orders each week, while sharing core capabilities with Tesco’s wider online grocery operation.
Sales via Whoosh were up by 51% in the year to the end of February 2026, surpassing £400m.
According to Kawaldeep Anand, head of product – digital customer experience (CX) for Whoosh and Tesco’s grocery home shopping division, the service’s success has been driven by building on Tesco’s existing technology estate rather than replacing it.
“Whoosh hasn’t been built as a separate proposition,” he says. “It has been built as part of our wider digital and store ecosystem.”
That philosophy has shaped every stage of the platform’s evolution over the past five years.
Platform thinking
As demand for rapid grocery delivery has accelerated, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic when partnerships such as Boots and Deliveroo and Asda and Uber Eats were established to cater to the unprecedented consumer need for q-commerce, Tesco resisted creating a standalone application, fulfilment platform or engineering organisation.
Instead, the retailer integrated Whoosh into the same customer-facing digital channels, core retail services and operational platforms already supporting its wider grocery business.
Whoosh hasn’t been built as a separate proposition. It has been built as part of our wider digital and store ecosystem Kawaldeep Anand, Tesco
“This has allowed us to grow the service in a measured way using our existing store network, our familiar app and website, our Clubcard capabilities, our fulfilment technology and our delivery partner network,” Anand explains.
From a technology perspective, this has apparently created several advantages. Existing services could be reused, engineering investment benefited multiple business units simultaneously, and innovations developed for Whoosh could flow back into Tesco’s broader retail platform.
“It has given us a chance to test and refine the technology, improve the operating model, and to listen to colleagues and customer feedback along the way,” says Anand. “As a result, we’ve built a robust, resilient, scalable technology solution that benefits the whole Tesco Group rather than just a rapid delivery platform.”
A tech stack built largely in-house
At the centre of Whoosh sits a technology platform that Tesco has overwhelmingly developed internally.
“Almost the entire technology stack behind Whoosh, from customer-facing applications through to the APIs [application programming interfaces] that power the service, is bespoke and designed, built and managed by the Tesco Technology division,” says Anand.
The architecture comprises four primary layers. The CX layer delivers Whoosh through the existing Tesco mobile app and Tesco.com, allowing customers to use familiar payment methods, Clubcard functionality and digital journeys rather than switching to a separate rapid-commerce application.
Supporting this is the colleague and fulfilment layer, which connects store-based picking applications with Tesco’s retail and fulfilment platform. These services orchestrate inventory availability, pricing, payments, customer orders, routing, capacity planning, picking workflows and marshalling.
The third layer integrates external delivery providers, including Uber Eats, Just Eat and Stuart, through APIs that manage dispatch, collection, delivery tracking and customer notifications. As order volumes have increased, Tesco has continually evolved these integrations to improve resilience and operational scalability, according to Anand.
Completing the architecture is a data and analytics layer that provides operational visibility across customer demand, fulfilment efficiency and platform performance, allowing product and engineering teams to optimise capacity, improve CX, and identify opportunities for continuous improvement.
Third-party technology is used selectively where it provides clear value. For example, Tesco continues to use Worldpay as its payments gateway. However, Anand stresses that the core CX, fulfilment logic, orchestration services and Clubcard integration remain proprietary capabilities developed by Tesco Technology.
For Tesco, that level of ownership delivers an important strategic advantage – the ability to evolve rapidly without depending on supplier roadmaps or undertaking major platform replacements.
Stores for scale
Building the platform was only one challenge. Scaling it across hundreds of stores presented another.
Unlike rapid-commerce specialists built around dark stores, Tesco needed to enable physical stores to support traditional retail operations while simultaneously functioning as local fulfilment hubs.
“The store network is central to the model,” says Anand. “Stores are close to customers, they already hold the grocery inventory, and they are already part of their local communities.”
The engineering challenge therefore became one of orchestration rather than infrastructure.
“The technology challenge is to make that network even more responsive to their communities, so a store can serve customers shopping in person and ordering digitally.”
When Whoosh expanded into Tesco Express stores, the operational model became significantly more complex. Smaller footprints, reduced staffing levels and different workflows meant existing systems required adaptation rather than simple replication. Tesco responded by redesigning order-picking applications, colleague messaging and fulfilment workflows specifically for convenience stores.
The retailer also developed new catchment optimisation algorithms that balance customer demand, picking capacity and delivery partner availability to maximise fulfilment performance while protecting delivery promises.
Notably, these enhancements were introduced without deploying additional physical tech devices into stores, reducing implementation complexity and minimising operational disruption, according to Anand.
“If you needed evidence that rapid delivery can be successfully integrated into a wider retail operating model rather than treated as something separate from stores, we’re it,” he says.
Cross-functional product engineering
Whoosh’s organisational model mirrors its platform architecture.
What began as a small innovation team has evolved into multiple multidisciplinary squads spanning product management, engineering, programme delivery, user experience, experimentation, analytics and data science.
“The early 0-to-1 journey was driven by close collaboration between our business and Tesco Technology teams,” Anand explains.
We deliberately avoided creating a standalone technology stack for rapid delivery to make sure innovation flowed through the business both ways – from the wider business to Whoosh and vice versa Kawaldeep Anand, Tesco
Today, those teams own products throughout their lifecycle, enabling rapid experimentation alongside operational accountability.
“Our way of working is important. Whoosh is a live service operating at pace and scale, so these multidisciplinary teams own products and services end-to-end. They need to be able to experiment, iterate quickly, and work closely with store operations and business teams to solve practical challenges.”
Crucially, according to Anand, Tesco avoided creating isolated engineering capabilities for rapid commerce.
“We deliberately avoided creating a standalone technology stack for rapid delivery to make sure innovation flowed through the business both ways – from the wider business to Whoosh and vice versa,” he says.
AI accelerating product delivery
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly supporting both software delivery and operational optimisation across Tesco Technology.
“Our approach is practical, and we see it as a powerful tool as opposed to a standalone capability,” says Anand.
Within Whoosh, AI is already being applied throughout the product development lifecycle, supporting rapid prototyping, design analysis, insight generation, experimentation and testing.
“This helps our teams move from idea to evidence more quickly,” he adds.
Operationally, Tesco has already demonstrated measurable benefits. AI-enabled scheduling tools created an additional 100,000 online delivery slots in the week before Christmas, while Whoosh attracted more than 250,000 new customers in the same period, according to Anand.
Looking ahead, Tesco sees opportunities in AI-enabled product discovery, conversational commerce and shopping journeys delivered through messaging platforms including WhatsApp.
“The important point is that customers and colleagues may not always see AI directly,” says Anand. “Instead, they experience the benefits through services that feel more relevant, more reliable and easier to use.”
Business performance metrics
Tesco acknowledges the pace of rapid commerce demands a product operating model built around continuous delivery rather than periodic releases.
According to Anand, product managers spend their time balancing customer needs, engineering priorities and operational realities through constant collaboration with business, engineering, user research, data science and operations teams.
Ideas are validated through experimentation and A/B testing before broader deployment, ensuring product decisions remain evidence-based.
“The work is both practical and strategic, and success is measured by business performance metrics, not outputs,” he says.
We will continue to make the experience more personalised and intuitive by making it easier to build baskets, improving access to Clubcard rewards and using data and customer insight responsibly to create a more relevant shopping experience Kawaldeep Anand, Tesco
As Whoosh enters its next phase of growth, Tesco’s priorities remain closely aligned with its platform strategy.
Expansion will focus on extending geographical coverage, increasing store participation, broadening the available product range and continuing to personalise the CX through data-driven capabilities. There is also a recognition within Tesco that rapid delivery itself is evolving.
“Rapid delivery started with emergency top-ups,” says Anand. “That’s still important, but customers are increasingly using Whoosh for broader baskets.”
The retailer is already experimenting with larger basket sizes and later same-day fulfilment in selected locations, creating new use cases that bridge traditional grocery delivery and immediate convenience shopping.
From a technology perspective, that evolution looks set to rely on the same architectural principles that have underpinned Whoosh since its 2021 launch.
“We will continue to make the experience more personalised and intuitive by making it easier to build baskets, improving access to Clubcard rewards and using data and customer insight responsibly to create a more relevant shopping experience,” Anand notes.
Tesco’s strategy demonstrates that rapid commerce, q-commerce, or speedy delivery – whatever a retailer refers to it as – does not necessarily require separate technology estates or independent operating models. Instead, by treating it as another capability within a common platform, Tesco has created an architecture supporting both innovation and long-term scalability – a crucial combination in a retail world that never stands still.
