Many customers are channelling some of their food budget away from grocery to casual dining and other food service offers. There’s a real opportunity for us in this arena. We aim to surprise and delight our customers with great taste experiences whenever they visit a Waitrose store.

Building excitement around food is key, like the introduction of our fresh, expertly crafted Sushi Daily counter. But that’s just the beginning. We want to hear from startups working on something special, something that will wow our customers, whether that’s immersive pop up food experiences, wine tasting or supper clubs. We want to hear about your weird and wonderful in-store hospitality experiences.

We take immense pride in our stores because that’s where the customer experience comes to life. Increasingly customers are looking for experiences when they go to a department store.  We need to make this magical and inspiring, an experience that won’t be forgotten in a hurry.

So, how can we go further to personalise the interactions between our Partners and customers? What store events and services could strengthen our brand and make John Lewis the ultimate and unique shopping experience?

The ideal shopping experience is a seamless journey for our customers both in store and online. Ultimately, one that bridges the gap between the two.

We’re looking for solutions that create a frictionless shopping experience for John Lewis and Waitrose customers. How can we deliver an uninterrupted click and collect experience online to in store? How can we ensure digital loyalty from our customers?

We want to hear from startups who can help enhance the shopping experience, speed up our processes and save our customers time.

The John Lewis Partnership are passionate about encouraging our customers to live well, and enhance their lives. Whether that’s vitamin subscriptions, healthy food trials or diet monitoring. We want to find innovative health and wellbeing tech that can be implemented across online and instore. If you’re working on something that could add value to our customers, we want to hear from you.

The pace of retail evolution places ever increasing demand on the supply chain to be more reliable, flexible, faster and yet cost-effective. John Lewis and Waitrose would like to hear from startups who have innovative ideas or solutions to disrupt traditional supply chain practices. Be it ideas around last mile deliveries, reduction in waste, farm to fork traceability, efficient customer fulfilment, efficient returns processing, asset pooling,  or smart product IDs / Internet of Things – if you have an idea that can deliver value quickly, we want to hear from you!

We want to discover exciting ideas we’ve never even thought about. If you have an innovation that doesn’t quite fit into one of the other five categories, get in touch and surprise us! We’re particularly interested in solutions that as well as AI or machine learning technologies that could create greater personalisation and actionable insights for our customers.