Waitrose releases customer value faster through micro-frontend architecture
How a leading UK supermarket chain improved agility and scalability to boost shopper satisfaction.
Moving to Micro Front-Ends has been an exciting journey and has already begun to unlock value for our customers as well as our product teams.
Owen Nicol, Principle Software Engineer, John Lewis Partnership
The challenge
Today, the most successful businesses are those that shorten time to value by speeding up innovation and solving problems to respond more rapidly to changing customer needs. This is especially true in the highly competitive retail sector, where attracting customers and retaining loyalty are paramount. Recognising the importance of this, Waitrose approached long-term software development partner Mindera to help achieve a stepchange in agility.
The solution
The Waitrose Online team proposed migrating their grocery website from a monolithic single-page application to independently testable and deployable micro-frontend (MFE) apps that reflected the end-user customer journey. MFEs are becoming increasingly popular in web application development because they offer a flexible and scalable approach to building frontend applications. This is proving particularly useful due to the rise of complex web applications and the demand for quicker releases.
In collaboration with the internal Waitrose Online team, Mindera helped with building a proof of concept, which included the required foundational work for wider adoption. We then provided support for onboarding and educating other development teams that needed to migrate over to this new architectural paradigm.
The results
Shorter lead times mean more frequent releases of new features for shoppers, lower change failure rates and quicker resolution of customer issues.
The new MFE architecture allowed Waitrose to reduce dependencies between teams allowing for better team ownership and shorter lead times to deliver front-end website changes. This has improved customer satisfaction, developer experience and Core Web Vital scores, due to faster site speed and better performance.
The reduced lead times mean more frequent releases of new features for shoppers, lower change failure rates and quicker resolution of customer issues. With individual teams now overseeing their own applications, rather than contributing code to an app owned by multiple teams, accountability and ownership has also improved, heightening motivation and performance.
Our Partners have worked alongside Mindera every step of the way, from discovery to production, and to amazing results.
Owen Nicol, Principle Software Engineer, John Lewis Partnership
About Waitrose
Founded in 1904 in Acton, London, supermarket chain Waitrose, part of the John Lewis Partnership, has 329 shops across Great Britain and the Channel Islands. Famous for its people-first approach, where employees are partners, and providing an outstanding shopper experience, Waitrose has a growing customer base that increased by over 400,000 people in 2024. Its net promoter customer score also rose by six points, indicating a significant improvement in customer loyalty and satisfaction.