Google Spotlights Loblaw’s Use of Technology to Support Canadians During COVID-19

In an official blog post, Google has spotlighted how Loblaw is using technology to support its community and protect its employees, while also growing its business amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Loblaw, a 100-year-old company, is the largest grocery and retail pharmacy chain in Canada, with over 200,000 employees.

Loblaw was one of the few grocery chains in Canada to start offering the ability to order online and pick up groceries the same day when Coronavirus first hit North America.

As online traffic and order volumes reached unprecedented levels, Loblaw’s online grocery websites and Google Cloud worked together to stabilize and settle into a level of online traffic that seems now to be the new normal.

According to Hesham Fahmy, VP of Technology at Loblaw Digital, “Loblaw’s systems are operating at a scale comparable to other large global e-commerce retailers.”

“In the matter of days, our online traffic spiked four-fold,” said Vice President, Online Grocery, Sharon Lansing. “During this time, it was critical that our teams were able to find ways to better serve our customers and ensure that we were able to deliver that service quickly.” 

Loblaw’s foresight and investments in technology enabled the company to react and adapt quickly to COVID-19.

Loblaw’s teams are now consolidating multiple data sources in Google Cloud, which will give them the ability to look across their data and find new ways to serve customers.