Case Study: Sainsbury's achieves real-time supply chain transformation and better forecasting with Confluent

A Modern Retailer With an Outdated Data Infrastructure

Sainsbury’s, the UK grocery retailer serving millions across more than 1,400 stores, faced slow, fragile legacy databases that blocked access to the real‑time event data needed to modernize its supply chain and logistics. To handle huge volumes of events, enable cloud‑native streaming, and avoid the overhead of self‑managing Kafka, Sainsbury’s adopted Confluent as the data‑streaming backbone (moving from open‑source Apache Kafka to Confluent’s fully managed platform and services).

Confluent delivered fully managed Kafka services, ksqlDB stream processing, Schema Registry, pre‑built connectors, multicloud interconnectivity and professional services to take over governance and accelerate adoption. As a result, Sainsbury’s now has real‑time data streams, improved forecasting and supply‑chain responsiveness, easier AWS integration, reduced costs and faster time‑to‑market — including more than doubling engineering efficiency and reclaiming an average of 20 hours per sprint per team thanks to Confluent’s managed services.

Sainsbury's

Pedro Baeta

Senior Engineering Manager