Case Study: Loblaw achieves 4x faster online grocery performance and real-time personalization with Google Cloud Platform

Loblaw Building customer loyalty through better shopping experiences

Loblaw, Canada’s largest food and pharmacy retailer with nearly 2,500 locations and about 200,000 employees, needed to make its digital shopping experiences more timely and personalized. Its Quick Shop storefront relied on stale data because real-time computations weren’t possible, and marketing teams couldn’t run promotions without IT involvement. Loblaw wanted to avoid expanding on‑premises infrastructure or growing its ops burden so tech teams could focus on innovation.

Loblaw migrated its online grocery platform to Google Cloud Platform using a lift‑and‑shift approach with Google Cloud Professional Services and Publicis.Sapient, completing the initial move in six months. The shift delivered a 4x performance boost, capacity for up to 3x the traffic, a one‑third reduction in compute needs, and the potential to reclaim about 50% of SRE time. It also enabled real‑time personalization via BigQuery, faster release cycles, greater resiliency, and more flexible marketing capabilities.

Loblaw

Hesham Fahmy

Vice President Technology