Asda seamlessly modernized its Scan & Go shopping app using Azure

Everyday grocery items reflect the demands of modern consumers. Shelves once stocked exclusively with instant coffee, white bread, and processed meat products now make room for alternatives like cold brew, multigrain toast, and plant-based protein options. But modern shoppers aren’t just on the lookout for healthier items to fill their pantries—they want a more convenient shopping experience that can fit seamlessly into their busy routines. As a supermarket with core applications purpose-built in the cloud, Asda provides that kind of shopping experience for the millions of customers who shop at its more than 1,000 locations across the United Kingdom each week.

For example, Asda developed an innovative application, Scan & Go, to streamline its customers’ trips to the store. Over 1 million shoppers use the app every week to save time and stay on budget by scanning items as they fill their carts. “Scan & Go is one of our key retail systems for customer satisfaction,” says Asda Software Development Manager Ian Stephenson. “Our customers are quite loyal about using it. With Scan & Go, they shop more efficiently. It also increases Asda’s productivity by increasing the speed of checkout and reducing the length of queues.” Asda considers Scan & Go a driving force of its Future Program, a three-year initiative that the forward-thinking supermarket launched to enhance its technology infrastructure. Asda rebuilt that infrastructure, used by more than 140,000 Asda employees, on Microsoft Azure.

Modernizing the Scan & Go application with Azure

By taking advantage of Azure App Service and Azure DevOps services like Azure Pipelines, Asda successfully modernized its Scan & Go system while maintaining its operations and easily rolling out new capabilities. “We get a big advantage with Azure App Service. It’s relatively straightforward for us to use our preferred infrastructure as code provider to spin up the infrastructure,” says Haigh. “And the out-of-the-box tasks in Azure DevOps improve our ability to rapidly deploy changes and functionality.” This technological flexibility has tangible benefits for a supermarket that must constantly adapt to seasonal customer demands. Adds Stephenson, “We’ve got a customer loyalty app called Asda Rewards, and it was promoting a deal on pumpkins for Halloween. That drove a lot more foot traffic into the stores, and our Scan & Go services automatically scaled to cope with that extra demand. We found this encouraging before heading toward our biggest week of the year, which is the week before Christmas. That ability to change things without us having to click a button is crucial.” 

Asda gains additional flexibility from Azure API Management, which the supermarket uses to facilitate its multiple-vendor approach. “We have five or six different core digital vendors and a number of ancillary providers to meet niche requirements as part of a very big integration piece,” says Haigh. “API Management and the various Azure integration services play a major role. We use API Management to handle more than 150,000 requests a minute across numerous integrations.” By using Azure solutions to help manage its integrations, Asda has better overall visibility into its cloud environment. Haigh continues, “Because everything for Scan & Go sits within Azure, we have a single place to manage our cost and usage. It really simplifies our budget management.” 

The supermarket also wanted to bolster its environment’s availability and reliability. Asda places Scan & Go devices into the hands of customers who need to be able to trust that their grocery lists and scanned items will remain intact on the app. Asda stores that data using Azure Cosmos DB. “We need Scan & Go to remain quite resilient to failure. If it goes down while a customer’s in the middle of shopping and they’ve scanned 200 items into their basket, they’ll be annoyed when they go to check out and they have to scan all those items again,” explains Haigh. “So, we adopted Azure Cosmos DB for its reliability features, the automated cross-region failover capabilities, and its autoscaling ability. Our activity ramps up, particularly on a Sunday. Autoscaling allows us to meet those demands. We just configure the maximum and it deals with that for us.”

Asda uses Azure Functions, Azure Web PubSub, and Azure Event Hubs to help ensure its Scan & Go devices work properly. “We manage 20,000 devices and the kiosk using Web PubSub as a service for various event-based methods,” says Kar. “We use Event Hubs and other event-based triggers for communication between the various Azure Functions apps.” 

Asda maximizes agility with Azure 

With a grocery list of Azure products and services at its disposal, Asda is already realizing the value of its Scan & Go transformation. The enhanced application is now live on more than 26,000 devices in more than 600 stores, accounting for up to 8% of overall store transactions for one of the United Kingdom’s largest grocery retailers. Up to 25% of shoppers in certain locations use Scan & Go, which indicates further adoption to come. As Stephenson notes, “We did more than 230 production releases to Azure in 2024, which is a tenfold increase compared to what we did in 2020 and the pre-Azure production on Walmart.”

This increase in productivity is even more impressive considering that Asda had to maintain consistent operations for employees and customers throughout the Scan & Go rebuild. The supermarket cites the high availability and low maintenance of its Azure environment as instrumental in facilitating a smooth transition from Walmart. “We have very little maintenance and management or support overhead,” says Haigh. “The Azure services pretty much run themselves. They self-heal.”

The combination of flexibility and reliability puts Asda in an enviable position as the retailer sets its sights on new capabilities. “With Azure, we now have a framework to develop new services,” says Stephenson. “And we’ve got the understanding for shared functions from the pipelines to be able to respond faster to change in the future.” This ability to facilitate exponential innovation is a game changer for Asda. “We’re always looking at how we can make the best use of developments in Azure,” says Haigh. “Our ability to deliver change quickly, whether adding new functionality or fixing production bugs, with the technologies we’ve chosen—that’s the real business value.” 

With firm footing in its Azure environment, Asda is putting that business value into motion with its AI plans. “There are several internal ideas that we’ve had about how we can use AI, in terms of how we manage our Scan & Go controls and manage knowledge within the e-commerce space,” says Haigh. “Across the Future Program, we’ve generated a wealth of documents and code Confluence pages. But it’s hard to find the details you’re looking for within those. So we’re looking at how we can use AI to best find the answers to targeted questions across different distributed sources.”

From scribbling lists onto a piece of paper to scanning items directly into a cloud account, shopping will continue to change. Innovative retailers will find new ways to meet customers’ needs and streamline their shopping experience. By adopting flexible tools and a scalable, resilient environment, Asda has equipped itself to give those customers a glimpse at the future of grocery shopping, which evolves with every visit to the supermarket.

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