Responding to fire: an Ocado case study

F&RM sits down with Alison Phillips of Ocado Group, to discuss ongoing fire safety developments and working with their insurers.

In 2019, Ocado’s Andover Customer Fulfilment Centre (CFC) suffered a large, and well publicised fire caused by an electrical fault at a battery charging unit. That blaze would knock out 10% of the retailer’s entire capacity, and cause significant delay and disruption to customer orders. A further blaze in 2021 at their Erith CFC in south London, was caused by three robots colliding. However, this incident only affected 1% of the grid capacity for a short period of time.

So what changed and what has been put in place which meant this second fire had less impact, and how has Ocado Group’s relationship with their insurers, FM Global, helped to improve standards and resilience moving forward?

As part of the Fire Protection Association's continuing commitment to increase fire safety awareness across the built environment, a number of informative feature articles are available to read on our website.?You can read the full article here.