Austrian Post has won a logistics award for its innovative nationwide food delivery service ‘Food4all@home’ and signed up more food e-retailers.
The postal operator won the Austrian Logistics Prize as the most innovative service in the category “Restructuring of the Supply Chain” for the grocery delivery service.
Since November 2014, Austrian Post and the grocery wholesaler Pfeiffer Handelsgruppe have been offering home deliveries of groceries ordered online via www.shop.unimarkt.at, a subsidiary of Pfeiffer Handelsgruppe, and delivered the next day in Upper Austria. Since April 2015, the service is available to all Austrian households nationwide. Customers living in the Linz area can additionally use a same-day delivery service.
The successful implementation of the food home delivery service follows the 18-month research project ‘Food4all@home’ that was completed in February this year. It was conducted in cooperation with the logistics department of the University of Applied Sciences in Steyr, Upper Austria, and RISC Software GmbH.
The key goal of the Food4all@home project was to develop a modern last-mile logistics concept for comprehensive and timely supply of fresh food. “Passive cooling of products was necessary for this and thus the deployment of reusable boxes. This way, the home delivery service can be used in a cost-efficient way all over Austria especially benefitting people who need to cope with physical, time or other constraints of personal mobility,” Peter Umundum, Austrian Post board member responsible for the Parcel & Logistics division, explained.
As part of the project, the parties involved developed three delivery models ‘for a full refrigerator without entering a supermarket’. These include same-day delivery in the evenings in Linz, next-day delivery across Austria and collection of products at pick-up stations.
RISC Software developed a last-mile simulation framework for Food4all@home that takes into account the current traffic situation. This, in turn, enables Austrian Post to optimise its delivery rounds and the delivery times and keep them to-the-minute by taking the rush hour traffic into account.
Umundum highlighted the enormous potential of grocery deliveries. “We want to continue to expand our service portfolio related to food deliveries in the future and cooperate with other partners.”
Meanwhile, Austrian Post has announced a new cooperation with two grocery e-retailers. Via a new Austrian online shop ‘GUSTINO – pork’ that ensures animal welfare and strict quality control of regional pork producers, customers can now order meat from regional farmers. With effect from March, they can additionally order other regional products, mostly in bio quality, via the e-retailer ‘ABHOF.KAUFEN’, with Austrian Post taking over the delivery for both online shops.
Austrian Post delivers the online orders of GUSTINO and ABHOF.KAUFEN customers the next day all over Austria to their door step keeping the products fresh and cooled during transportation. For safe transportation of sensitive products such as meat, the postal operator uses certified cool boxes which keep the temperature for up to 48 hours by means of specific thermal packs.
“Our logistics solutions in terms of grocery delivery reliably fulfill customers’ needs. Products in the cool box stay as fresh as in the refrigeration section in the supermarket and are being delivered throughout Austria to the customers’ front door,” Umundum said.
The two web shops GUSTINO and ABHOF.KAUFEN are operated by ECOM Consulting GmbH, which specialises in e-commerce in the food industry. "Sustainability and environmental awareness are currently hot topics and particularly important for our customers. This is one of the reasons we have chosen the Post as our logistics partner, because customers can return the food boxes in a convenient way and for free," Markus Holzmann, ECOM Managing Director, commented.
