How Picnic uses Slack to revolutionise the world of online groceries

Written by Pepijn van AkenFeb 16, 2024 15:145 min read

Our focus on making online grocery shopping simple, fun, and affordable has propelled us to become the fastest-growing online supermarket globally. With a unique business model and a dedicated customer base, our mission is to empower everyone to enjoy hassle-free grocery shopping.
From our humble beginnings as a small team in one city to now having over 15.000 colleagues serving one million active customers across the Netherlands, France, and Germany, it’s been a wild ride. Slack has been a part of our growth story from the very beginning. Today, all people working at Picnic rely on Slack for communication and collaboration. Whether it’s coordinating schedules, sharing announcements, or facilitating team discussions, Slack is the communications highway of our internal operations.
Building tailored solutions with Slack
At Picnic, we prefer building tailored solutions to complex problems so they match our exact requirements. From developing all software powering our automatic warehouses to creating the open-source library Error Prone Support , we do it all in-house — and our approach with Slack is no different.
With 12.000 of our colleagues working in warehouses or as delivery drivers, all using smartphones, Slack has become our go-to communication tool. From managing work schedules to requesting time off, Slack is the central platform for all our interactions. Instead of relying solely on off-the-shelf Slack apps, we’ve developed custom services tailored to our unique needs. For instance, our in-house shift scheduling system considers factors like experience and skill sets, ensuring efficient allocation of people.
Another example of our tailored approach is the custom application for tracking driver safety. At Picnic, safety is crucial. Especially given the scale at which we operate and the number of trips we drive daily. We developed a tool that not only monitors safety metrics but also provides daily reports to drivers, promoting a culture of safety awareness. These reports are shared with the drivers through Slack, where they also receive weekly reports with customer feedback. There are no separate platforms for safety scores, customer feedback, or scheduling, all the information our drivers need is gathered into a single platform.

Our driving coach informs drivers on how safe they drive

Automating and standardising communication
As we grow and start operating in new countries, staying consistent is key. We want to ensure things are similar everywhere to avoid reinventing the wheel. At the same time, there’s a local aspect to our operations. Each fulfilment center is a unique entity, and every hub forms its own close-knit community. We believe in supporting these smaller hubs and empowering our colleagues to find solutions that best suit their needs. That’s why we encourage every member of our team to take initiative and leverage tools like Slack’s workflow to standardise work processes and communications flows.
For example, take our company chef in the Amsterdam office, who cooks delicious meals for lunch and events. The chef created a custom workflow used to reduce food waste while preparing for events. Using Slack, the team of chefs collects information about the event, such as how many people will attend and any dietary restrictions, helping them plan accordingly.

Our chef collects info about events via this workflow

When things don’t go as planned
From a supplier missing a deadline to a snowstorm to a simple delay — sometimes things go sideways. For these incidents, we’ve developed Mr. Murphy: our very own incident management tool, fully integrated with Slack. It gives our tech team of 350 people a helping hand and streamlines the process.
Unlike traditional help desks, any team member can start an incident report with a simple slash command. This command starts a structured approach where the incident reporter answers four key questions, guiding them through a decision tree to assess the severity and impact of the issue. Based on the outcome, relevant teams are notified, allowing them to come into action to solve the problem. All reported incidents are visible company-wide for full transparency. We have further developed our incident tooling so people involved in an incident can, with just a few clicks, adjust incident severity, assign ownership, and establish a dedicated incident channel, complete with an automatic Google Meet link for real-time collaboration.

Any team member can report an incident

To further improve our efficiency, we’ve recently integrated ChatGPT into our incident management toolkit. This enables automatically generating concise summaries of incident channel conversations, providing valuable insights for incident reports, post-mortems, or bringing anyone up to speed.
Allowing for growth and scale
As we continue to expand our operations, Slack remains our tool of choice in scalability. Its versatility and ease of use enable us to maintain structured communication mechanisms, even during our fast growth. We will continue driving automation and will be looking to expand our AI-driven insights based on what is happening in our Slack workspace.
We’d love to hear how you’re using Slack! Share your innovative approaches with us, and if you’re passionate about shaping the future of online groceries, consider joining the Picnic team!