HATFIELD, England, June 19 /PRNewswire/ --

- Independent Research Backs Ocado as Greenest Grocer

Shopping with Ocado (http://www.ocado.com) is now greener than shopping in a conventional supermarket, even if you are walking to the store.

The claim has been confirmed by independent carbon management consultancy Greenstone as part of a detailed audit of Ocado's environmental business performance.

Ocado co-founder, Jason Gissing, explains, "After six successive years of growth, our carbon footprint - calculated as carbon emitted per pound of sales - has reached the point where shopping with us is greener than walking to the local supermarket. The more we can encourage people to try our service, the lower our carbon count per pound of sales becomes. By shopping with Ocado an individual can actively cut his or her personal carbon footprint."

Ocado operates in a completely different way from traditional supermarkets and other online competitors which all rely upon store networks to fulfil customers' orders. Typical stores operate large numbers of open chillers to keep food at the right temperature in-store and require heat and light to create a pleasant, appealing shopping environment. Instead, Ocado has a central warehouse and a fleet of vehicles taking groceries direct to customers' homes.

Mathew de Villiers from Greenstone comments, "Traditional supermarket retailing necessitates the construction of new sites as sales grow which adds to the ecological footprint of these retailers, and generally goes un-reported. For Ocado however, the infrastructure is already in place to handle three times the current order volumes, making the Ocado warehouse model more environmentally friendly. Furthermore, Ocado's ambitious targets to continue reducing their emissions towards 2012 will mean that the carbon intensity of an Ocado delivery continues to have a lower impact then that arising from walking to a traditional supermarket."

For further information, please contact: Bernadette Ahmed +44-(0)7867-901720 bernadette.ahmed@ocado.com

For further information, please contact: Bernadette Ahmed, +44-(0)7867-901720, bernadette.ahmed@ocado.com