The company is looking to reach 75 per cent of Canadian households in three years through new distribution centres and online ordering.
Empire Company Ltd. may have just entered the e-commerce grocery space in Toronto one month ago, but it’s already planning an expansion that will give it the ability to reach 75 per cent of Canadian households in the next three years.
Empire, which owns Sobeys, FreshCo and Farm Boy, revealed a new three-year plan which it said will generate $500M in annualised EBITDA by the end of fiscal 2023. The plan, titled Project Horizon, will see Empire spend an average of $700M in each of the three years to increase its market share and notably, “win Canadian grocery e-commerce.”
“It’s early on, but when you have a better mouse trap like we do, the confidence level is very high,” Empire CEO Michael Medline told the Financial Post.
The Nova Scotia-based conglomerate plans to expand its e-commerce service, Voila, by completing the construction of a fulfilment centre in Montreal in 2022 — its second, after the first opened in Toronto in June — as well as adding two in undisclosed locations. Each facility, which employs hives of robots to pick out groceries and send them down to human workers who bag them up and ship them out, will cost the company about $100M to build, Medline said.
