Case Study: Co-op achieves faster ML-driven personalization and unified analytics with Databricks

Co-op - Customer Case Study

The Co-operative Group (Co-op) is the UK’s largest consumer co‑operative with over 4,200 locations and 4.5 million active members, operating in retail and packaged goods. Faced with terabytes of disparate data, disjointed tools and workflows, limited Spark and modern ML expertise, and data scientists restricted to curated datasets rather than systems, Co‑op struggled to explore data holistically and move rapidly from experimentation to production.

Deploying Azure Databricks gave Co‑op a unified, cloud‑first analytics platform with collaborative notebooks for ETL, large‑scale Spark processing, and end‑to‑end ML model development and deployment. The platform democratized data access, accelerated prototyping and delivery of new personalization features, unified data engineering and science workflows, and simplified infrastructure management—reducing time‑to‑value and operational costs through autoscaling and optimized cluster management.

Co-op

Rob McKendrick

Head of Data