How White Label: International Retailer uses GitHub

The world's third largest retailer partners with GitHub to drive innovation through open source best practices.

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Company Overview

Industry: Retail (Grocery)
Company Size: 440,000+
GitHub Seats: 2,500+
Location: United Kingdom

The UK's largest grocery chain and third biggest retailer in the world serves millions of customers weekly across the UK and Ireland. What began as a group of market stalls has evolved into a major retail operation offering in-store shopping, online ordering, delivery services, and account management. With more than 2,000 software developers distributed across the UK, central Europe, and Asia, plus a central tools team in Bangalore managing the organization's engineering infrastructure, the company needed a collaborative platform to support its global development efforts.

The Challenge

Developers had been using a Microsoft Distributed File System setup for version control, but the retailer needed a more modern solution. The company evaluated multiple tools across features, usability, and stability—and GitHub won in every category. As the retailer's Senior Technology Expert noted, GitHub was the most widely accepted and easy to use among all available options.

Enabling Collaboration and Innersource

GitHub helps the company's developers share resources and make autonomous changes across teams. The retailer's Systems Engineering Manager explained: "We're suggesting that people put their Jenkins files in GitHub. Putting developers in control makes it easier for teams to track and ship fixes."

The company hosts all documentation as GitHub Pages, accessible to anyone with company credentials through GitHub's SAML authentication. When access changes or an employee's account is suspended, the team can quickly and automatically enforce permissions using GitHub APIs—a critical capability as the company onboards between 300 to 500 new developers every year.

The retailer has partnered with GitHub to drive innovation through transparency and open source best practices, known as "innersourcing." This approach enables developers to view each other's code, give suggestions, and contribute across the organization. The Senior Technology Expert emphasized the company's commitment to this model: "We're asking our teams to make all their repositories public within the organization as soon as possible so that developers can view each other's code as well as give suggestions and comments on it."

Through innersource, the retailer expects teams to rally around higher quality, more innovative code with faster release times.

Operational Benefits

Administrative overhead has dropped significantly since adopting GitHub, even with only three people supporting the entire development organization. The Systems Engineering Manager highlighted the company's experience with GitHub Support: "We message GitHub if we run into a major issue, and when we ask for support, we get a very quick response. We occasionally need support, but when we do, we've been very satisfied with the experience."

Developer Experience

The Systems Engineering Manager sees GitHub as an opportunity to improve the developer experience enterprise-wide. Having previously used SVN and Team Foundation Server, he observed that "teams and people quite happy to use GitHub." He added: "GitHub is an enterprise solution, first of all, but it's also an open source solution that people can use in-house. Our developers love GitHub because they get to be part of a community."