Who Owns Ocado?

Ocado has no owner. Ocado Group plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange with no controlling shareholder and is exempt from PSC reporting. The supermarket you order from is a different company again: Ocado Retail Limited is a joint venture with Marks & Spencer, and Companies House records both parents holding 25–50% each. The register also shows what a stale filing looks like. Ownership verified 6 September 2026.

Who owns the Ocado brand?

The listed parent is OCADO GROUP PLC (07098618), incorporated 8 December 2009 and registered at Hatfield. Its PSC page carries an exemption rather than an owner: from 5 January 2019 the company is exempt from the requirement to obtain information of its PSC because it has voting shares admitted to trading on a UK regulated market.

No shareholder controls it. Its founders — Tim Steiner among them — hold minority stakes, and the largest holders are institutions.

Parent company and ultimate owner

Ocado is really two businesses, and only one of them is wholly Ocado’s.

OCADO RETAIL LIMITED (03875000, incorporated 11 November 1999 as Ocado Limited) is the grocery business. Its people with significant control are:

• Ocado Holdings Limited (07148670) — more than 25% but not more than 50% of shares
• Marks And Spencer Holdings Limited (11845975) — more than 25% but not more than 50% of shares, notified 5 August 2019

That is the 50:50 joint venture struck in 2019, when M&S paid to take half of Ocado’s retail arm and replaced Waitrose as the supplier of branded groceries on the site.

The rest of Ocado Group — the warehouse robotics and software sold to grocers worldwide — is wholly owned and is where most of the company’s value has been argued to sit.

Brand owner vs operating company

Ocado Group plc owns the brand and the technology. Ocado Retail Limited runs the shop, and M&S owns half of it.

So when someone asks who owns Ocado, the honest answer is that the company you buy groceries from is half-owned by Marks & Spencer, while the company listed on the stock exchange under the Ocado name is a technology business that owns the other half.

The register offers a lesson here too. Ocado Holdings’ earlier entry — recording 75% or more of the shares — ran until 18 December 2023, more than four years after M&S’s 25–50% entry began in August 2019. Both cannot have been accurate at once. Companies House does not check what is filed, and this is exactly what a stale entry looks like: not fraud, just a filing nobody updated until later. It is a useful caution against reading any single PSC entry as current fact without checking its dates against everything else on the page.

When the ownership changed

Ocado was founded in 2000 by three former Goldman Sachs bankers and floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2010, at a valuation many in the City thought too high for a company that had never made a profit.

Waitrose supplied its groceries under a long-running agreement from the beginning. In 2019 that ended: Marks & Spencer agreed to buy 50% of the retail business, and M&S products replaced Waitrose ones from September 2020.

There has been no takeover of Ocado Group itself, though it has been the subject of persistent speculation, and its share price has swung more violently than almost any other large listed British company.

Related brands in the same group

Ocado Group owns Ocado Retail (half), Ocado Solutions, Ocado Intelligent Automation and its technology subsidiaries, and has held stakes in robotics and vertical farming ventures.

It does not own Waitrose, which belongs to the John Lewis Partnership and has not supplied Ocado since 2020, and it does not own Morrisons, for whom it has operated online delivery under contract — running someone’s website is not owning their business.

Sources and verification

The company numbers, incorporation dates, the exemption wording and all PSC entries with their dates — including the overlapping one — are from the Companies House register.

Ocado Group’s own shareholders are disclosed through FCA major-holdings notifications and its annual report rather than at Companies House, and the terms of the M&S joint venture come from both companies’ announcements. Companies House does not verify most filed information, which is the point the overlapping entries above illustrate.