Ocado: an 18-year overnight success story

No one, it seemed, believed that online supermarket Ocado would ever survive or thrive. True believer and co-founder Tim Steiner did – and he has been vindicated. Jane Lewis reports.

Ocado delivery van
(Image credit: © Hollie Adams/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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Tim Steiner "has always divided opinion"
(Image credit: 2013 Bloomberg)

"Ocado begins with an o', ends with an o' and is worth zero," quipped one London-based analyst shortly after the company floated in 2010. Founded by three former Goldman traders a decade earlier, the outfit had broken new ground as Britain's first online delivery grocer.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.