Tesco is looking to roll out an express grocery delivery service, the supermarket’s online MD Adrian Letts has hinted.
Letts said he expected Tesco to “go further” than its same-day click & collect service at the IGD Digital Conference this week.
“There is a huge opportunity for one- and two-hour delivery because we have a Tesco in almost every UK postcode,” he told the conference. “In the centre of London, you’re never more than five minutes from a Tesco, so speed is something we can do.”
Letts didn’t rule out offering a one-hour bike delivery service such as the one being trialled by Sainsbury’s - Chop Chop - in the London area. “There’s plenty of things we could do. Watch this space,” he said.
“[Sainsbury’s chief executive] Mike Coupe said the future is all same-day delivery, which I thought was interesting. We have nationwide same-day click & collect, and I would expect us to go further.”
Walmart’s senior ecommerce director Saeed Anslow has also forecast that express grocery delivery is set to become increasingly important in the UK market, .
The optimal model for online grocery was using a “blend of” in-house vans for scheduled slots and third-party services for on-demand delivery, he told The Grocer..
Anslow stressed he could not speak for the Asda division of the business but said it was likely UK supermarkets would start to trial express delivery services such as the partnership between Walmart and third-party services Uber, Lyft and Deliv, piloted in the US in June.
The main UK players were currently doing “broadly the same thing”, he said, but he forecast this would change. “How long will it be before someone disrupts?”
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