dija

Amazon was never about the books. As booksellers went out of business, undercut by Amazon’s low prices, they were clearly an easy target, but its idea was far more powerful. It was about the data. And something similar is going on right now in grocery.

In the initial sales pitch by the likes of Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats, independents were only too pleased to be offered a helping hand in securing delivery for online orders. As demand for on demand delivery (ODD) has grown, however, we’ve seen the likes of Aldi, Asda, The Co-op, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s jump into bed with these operators. As well as meeting an apparent customer need without additional infrastructure cost, they’ve also been able to disassociate themselves from the ‘delivery’ charge and hefty product markups. A win-win.

But one wonders if these are not potentially dangerous liaisons? Watching recent Deliveroo TV ads offering to fulfil orders from all these partners certainly feels odd, reducing supermarkets to traded commodities, especially since their slimmed down ranges are invariably quite similar. And that inability to own the data – or know the shopper – must be troubling for the major mults. Wheeled into supermarket head offices, are they just glorified courier firms or Trojan horses, plundering data from within their walls?

Only last month Grocemania ratted on its independent retail customers, announcing it was opening dark stores, armed no doubt with precious customer data on their buying habits.

Could something similar happen with Deliveroo, Just Eat and so forth? They already have their own dark kitchens. What’s to stop them opening dark stores too?

Deliveroo CEO Will Shu isn’t ruling it out. As he says of the new kids on the rapid delivery block – the likes of Getir, Gorillas, Weezy and so forth, with their dark-store operations operating underneath the railway arches: “Any time I see something that is potentially good for a consumer that a different model is producing, I’m going to look at it very closely.”

Mind you, he also notes he’s “getting discounted food products from all of them so I’m pleased about that”.

Clearly Shu likes a bargain as much as any billionaire, but he must also be pleased they’re not making any more money than Deliveroo, and already we’re seeing consolidation, with Gopuff first acquiring Fancy and now Dija.

But it must be hugely galling to the supermarkets to see the startling valuations – not far short of Deliveroo in the case of Getir – for these loss-making operations when set against their own reliable, hugely profitable and highly cash generative models. No wonder private equity players are running the slide rule over the supermarkets, with Asda gobbled up, Morrisons on the block, and both Sainsbury’s and even Tesco in their sites.

It’s also not surprising, that Tesco, having abandoned its own one-hour delivery service in ???, has taken off the dust sheets on its own prototype. And Asda recently launched a one-hour delivery service trial for shoppers, this time encompassing its entire online range, with a maximum of 70 items. That will test the speed of any picking solution let alone one set up in a supermarket.

In the same week, however, Asda simultaneously extended its Just Eat partnership - suggesting that it’s not prepared to step away from these dangerous liaisons just yet.

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