Alibaba has invented the supermarket of the future

The sight of shopping bags being whipped above your head on conveyor belts is the first clue that Freshippo isn’t your average supermarket. Pickers in pale blue polo shirts scour shelves, scanning barcodes with smartphones to locate the precise brand of apples, sesame oil or spice mix that match online orders. For people who would rather shop in-store, there are all the items you might expect on your weekly shop – counters packed with fresh produce, samples of new products handed out on trays by smiling members of staff, and a selection of meat, fish and seafood – but plenty you wouldn’t. Though Alibaba controls some 80 per cent of China’s $3.5 trillion e-commerce market, it still wanted to master bricks and mortar – and acquire a bigger share of grocery sales. Only two years after opening that first store, online sales of groceries in China had risen to 32.5 per cent – in no small part thanks to this rapid rollout, with each Freshippo store processing “tens of thousands” of orders per day, says Guo Xulin, chief of staff at Alibaba’s Freshippo Business Group, and “over 60 per cent of Freshippo sales coming from online”.