Thirty years ago, the idea of doing the weekly supermarket shop without leaving home was a novel concept. Today, Kiwis can have groceries delivered in around half an hour.
For Robyn Snelgar, who joined Woolworths’ fledgling online team in 1996, the transformation has been extraordinary. “When online came to the store, hardly anyone had a computer, let alone the internet,” she tells Verve. “It was just this big new unknown thing that I felt I wanted to be part of.”
The trial began in July 1996 with just 100 customers, making Woolworths New Zealand one of the first three retailers globally to offer online grocery shopping. But the technology was a far cry from today’s seamless apps – customers received a CD to load the shopping website onto their computers, while orders arrived at the Manurewa store by fax.
Working in the store, Robyn would race back and forth to the fax machine before grabbing a clipboard and navigating the aisles to pick each order by hand. A large shop could take an hour to assemble.
There were no handy product images or reliable stock indicators, either, so Robyn spent considerable time improving product descriptions so customers could understand exactly what they were buying.
Even something as straightforward as ordering bananas could be tricky.
“Most people would go into a supermarket and buy a bunch of bananas, but they had no idea how much they weighed,” remembers Robyn. “So, they would take a guess and sometimes put 10kg by accident! We would try and ring them if you could see that it looked like a mistake.”
Initially, the operation handled only 10 to 12 orders a week, worth a few thousand dollars. Now, Woolworths fulfils more than eight million online orders annually, averaging over 150,000 a week.
The biggest turning point, says Robyn, was the Covid-19 pandemic. As lockdowns sent shoppers online and supermarket shelves struggled to keep pace with demand, purchase limits were introduced to ensure more people could access essential items.
“A lot of the elderly had never shopped online before and we had a team talking them through it.” Robyn says. “Some had gone without until their pantries had run dry and they were just desperate. So, you know, we really were essential services.”
Today, options like MILKRUN for on-demand delivery and Direct to Boot, allowing customers to order online and have groceries brought straight to their car, have joined the likes of Click & Collect launched nationwide in 2016. Now, 72 Direct to Boot locations means the service within a 10-minute drive of around 42 per cent of New Zealand’s population.
Robyn is proud not only of the technological advances, but also of the people she has watched develop their careers over three decades. She has made birthday cakes, baked cupcakes and even knitted baby gifts for colleagues!
And as Woolworths marks 30 years of online grocery shopping, its latest development is an AI-enabled platform launched in September 2026, designed to make the website and app more intuitive and personalised. For shoppers, the promise remains much the same as it was in 1996 – a simpler way to get the weekly shop done, with a little more time left for everything else.
Looking back, Robyn never imagined the experiment would become such a significant part of everyday life. “It’s incredible to see online go from paper and faxes to totally online, and so much automation,” she says. “There was doubt at the beginning because the internet and online shopping was such a new thing!”
