It emerged this weekend that Waitrose has retained the services of a QC to comb through the details of Ocado’s tie-up with Morrisons to see whether any breach of contract has occurred in its own deal with the online grocer.

Ocado chief executive Tim Steiner is adamant that no such breach has occurred, and to be fair it would seem extraordinary that Ocado would not have had this checked and checked again before entering into such an important phase of its business life.

Contract law is not my forte – and indeed it never was even was I was studying law at university many years ago – so let’s park that one for the moment.

Legal concerns aside, what is clear is that the nature of the deal has rattled Mark Price and co in Bracknell, and understandably so.

Since news of the talks between Ocado and Morrisons was first announced in March, all we were told was that Morrisons was interested in harnessing some of Ocado’s tech. The deal that emerged on Friday is so much more than that.

For all intents and purposes Ocado, Waitrose’s biggest customer, is helping one of its major rivals get a strong foothold in the online grocery market. It will also be handling Morrisons’ online grocery distribution for the next 25 years.

While Morrisons will be banking on picking up online share in its northern heartland, a key focus of its desire to get online is to get a stronger presence in London and the affluent South East, the very area were Waitrose is already fighting it out with Ocado, not to mention Tesco, Sainsbury’s and even Asda.

No doubt about it – the scale of this deal will have left Waitrose top brass fuming, and it’s hard to see how the current relationship can survive beyond 2017, despite Steiner’s assurances that this is a good deal for Waitrose.

Relations between the two have been becoming increasingly tense over the past few years since the gloves came off and they started competing directly against one another. Up until now though, the advantages of staying together have far outweighed the prospect of going it alone – by 2017 that may well no longer be the case and the ties that bind may not prove that strong.

For an in-depth analysis of the impact of the Morrisons/Ocado deal on the grocery sector see this week’s issue of The Grocer and thegrocer.co.uk/ocado

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