Iceland Foods is to offer online shopping again - seven years after Malcolm Walker scrapped the service.

The frozen food specialist will launch a new e-commerce website from January.

“We were one of the pioneers for online shopping when we launched in 1999, and it was marginally profitable.” chief executive Malcolm Walker told The Grocer. “But at that time few of our customers had a computer and there was no broadband.

“Now all of our customers have a computer, and they ask us to bring back online shopping on a daily basis. So we will experiment early next year with online. Right now we are finalising the website. It’s exciting.”

Walker said that an efficient delivery network was already established.

“Last week we did 175,000 home deliveries, which is good going,” he said. “We have a network in place, as well as the knowledge that home delivery is a huge attraction for our customers.”

Walker said that decisions such as whether to have regional trials or experiment with a limited number of customers nationwide are still being finalised.

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