It’s been a busy and bonkers few years for rapid delivery. In the madness of the pandemic, with online deliveries soaring, a new breed of operators emerged, startups promising 10-minute deliveries from new dark stores, funded by piles of investor cash.

But as the fortunes of Getir, Gorillas, Gopuff, Fancy and Zapp unravelled, sanity has prevailed, as have the incumbent delivery services – Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats – as well as the fast-delivery services of the grocers (with varying degrees of success) and specialist convenience store solutions such as Snappy Shopper and Flash. And rapid delivery grocery share, while still small, has kept ticking upwards.

Now, like London buses, two new aggregator apps have arrived on the scene in the space of two weeks. And what’s different this time is that they’ve been developed by wholesalers. In the past, symbol operators have left independent retailers largely to their own devices when it came to setting up online delivery services, watching on encouragingly and supportively as they set up with the delivery apps.

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But two weeks ago, the UK’s biggest wholesaler, Booker, felt obliged to act. The launch of Scoot was not before time. Independent convenience stores need as much help as they can get amid declining share and this is an opportunity to offer lower fees to the 8,000 retailers on its books, showcasing the rapid delivery expertise of parent company Tesco – although unlike Tesco’s Whoosh, which uses Uber Eats to deliver, Scoot relies on the retailer to provide the wheels.

In contrast, the Co-op’s new Peckish service, while using Snappy Shopper’s front end, dovetails with delivery drivers from aggregator apps. And it’s a sign of confidence that, having developed Peckish for Nisa retailers, it’s opening the service up to other independents it supplies, and targeting 1,000 retailers in the first year alone, and up to 3,000 within three years.

It’s intriguing to see how these two rapid delivery solutions will fare. They could be a real gamechanger for independent retailers – helping them boost sales and remain relevant in a rapidly changing world – and growing the pie for rapid delivery.

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