The FTSE 250 company's stock sat at roughly 181p at the time of the announcement on Monday, as first reported by City A.M., having shed approximately a fifth of its value over the past year. The succession search, led by chairman Adam Warby, marks a pivotal moment for a business that has never delivered sustained group-level profitability.

In a statement, the company said: "Ocado confirms that the CEO and the Board continually engage in long-term succession planning and regularly engage with potential candidates," according to City A.M.

Why the board is moving now

Steiner co-founded Ocado in 2000 alongside two former Goldman Sachs colleagues and led the company through its float a decade later. For much of the intervening period, the board backed his strategic repositioning of the business from an online grocer into a warehouse automation technology provider. That patience now appears to have limits.

Two events in particular accelerated the timeline. In November 2025, US grocery partner Kroger announced the closure of three fulfilment centres equipped with Ocado's robotic technology. Ocado's share price fell 17% in a single session, dropping to 179p, a 12-year low, according to City A.M. Then in February 2026, the company warned of "significant" job cuts and disclosed it was actively seeking new partners to replace the lost Kroger volume. Shares fell a further 10% on that news.

Steiner himself acknowledged missteps in the partnership model. He told investors that Ocado had been "naive" to accept contracts from its North American partners, adding that the company needed partners who, "having made a commitment to a site, work very hard to put volume into that site," as reported by City A.M.

Steiner's remuneration has also drawn scrutiny. His pay has risen despite heavy losses at the group level, a pattern that rarely escapes the attention of institutional shareholders in a company trading near its listing price after 16 years.

What the successor profile tells us

Warby, who formerly led the executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, is directing the process personally. The board has already approached Niklas Heuveldop, chief executive of Vonage, a subsidiary of Swedish telecoms group Ericsson, as reported by Sky News.

The choice is revealing. Heuveldop is neither a grocery executive nor a logistics specialist. Vonage operates a cloud communications platform, selling software and APIs to enterprise clients. If the approach signals the type of candidate the board favours, it suggests Ocado's directors see the company's future value residing in its technology licensing and software platform rather than in its retail operations or physical fulfilment infrastructure.

That reading aligns with the trajectory Steiner himself set. But it also implies the board believes a different kind of leader is needed to commercialise the technology at scale, one with experience selling complex enterprise software to large corporate clients across multiple geographies, rather than building it from scratch.

For a company that has burned through capital developing its Smart Platform robotic systems, the distinction matters. The engineering challenge may be largely solved; the commercial challenge, finding and retaining partners willing to commit the volumes needed to make automated fulfilment centres economically viable, is evidently not.

Ocado's partnership model under strain

Ocado's business rests on two pillars in the UK and an increasingly fragile international licensing operation.

Domestically, the company provides home delivery services through its retail joint venture with Marks & Spencer. Steiner chairs Ocado Retail, the entity that manages this partnership. However, the relationship is under strain. Ocado has threatened legal action against M&S over a £190m payment that the company says the retailer is withholding, according to City A.M. The dispute adds uncertainty to what should be a stable revenue stream.

The second domestic pillar is newer. Last month, Ocado announced a deal to upgrade Asda's online shopping operation, a contract that provided a rare piece of positive news and briefly lifted the share price, as reported by City A.M.

Internationally, the Kroger withdrawal represented the most significant setback to the technology licensing model that underpins Ocado's equity story. The closure of three warehouses did not merely reduce revenue; it raised questions about whether large grocery retailers are willing to sustain the capital expenditure and operational commitment that Ocado's automated fulfilment centres demand.

The wider grocery-tech sector faces similar scrutiny. Capital intensity is high, payback periods are long, and volume commitments from retail partners are difficult to enforce contractually once a site is operational. Ocado's experience with Kroger illustrates the asymmetry: the technology provider bears reputational and financial risk if a partner scales back, but has limited ability to compel throughput.

Lessons for founder-led businesses facing succession

Ocado's succession search offers a case study in how founder-led companies navigate leadership transitions under pressure. Several features of the situation recur across sectors.

First, the timing is rarely voluntary. Boards of founder-led businesses tend to defer succession planning when the share price is rising and accelerate it when performance deteriorates. Steiner, who owns 2% of Ocado according to City A.M., built the company over more than two decades. The decision to seek his replacement comes not at a moment of strength but at a point where the share price has effectively returned to its starting position.

Second, the choice of successor often signals a strategic pivot, or at least a change in emphasis. Approaching a telecoms and enterprise software executive rather than a grocery or supply chain operator suggests the board wants to double down on the technology platform narrative while bringing in commercial discipline that the current leadership has not delivered.

Third, founder transitions in technology-heavy businesses carry execution risk. Steiner's deep knowledge of Ocado's proprietary systems, its partner relationships, and its engineering culture is not easily transferred. Any incoming CEO will face a steep learning curve on the technical side while simultaneously needing to stabilise partner confidence and address the share price decline.

Finally, the dispute with M&S and the need to replace Kroger volumes mean the new chief executive will inherit a business with immediate commercial challenges, not merely a long-term strategic mandate. The luxury of a quiet handover period is unlikely.

Ocado's next chapter will test whether a change at the top can convert a compelling but capital-intensive technology thesis into the sustained profitability that has eluded the company since its founding. The board's choice of successor will say as much about its diagnosis of what went wrong as about its vision for what comes next.