DPD Germany is expanding its new grocery delivery service “DPD Food” across Germany offering “e-food recipients” a customised combination of express transport and precise one-hour delivery time slot leveraging the DPD Predict service.
In February this year, DPD Germany teamed up with HelloFresh, a leading international retailer of food boxes, as the first customer to use the tailor-made delivery solution. In the meantime, DPD has also started delivering fresh food on behalf of the online retailers myTime and Gourmondo. With this latest expansion, the company is making its industry solution available to other retailers in the e-food segment.
"With its new food product, DPD is ensuring that fresh groceries reach the consignee in a fast, convenient and reliable way", Andreas Reß, Director Sales and Customer Service at DPD Germany, explained. “We're convinced that with DPD Food we will be able to establish ourselves on a market that's going to experience tremendous growth in the next few years. We are therefore deliberately not concentrating on the big cities but are aiming at supplying consignees in all areas of Germany."
Thanks to DPD’s guaranteed express delivery of its food parcels, passive cooling is sufficient even for fresh groceries. Cool pads, for example, will keep perishable goods fresh for several days. Depending on the category of groceries, DPD Food offers guaranteed express delivery the next working day or guaranteed delivery by midday the next working day, if requested.
With DPD's Predict service, consignees are notified by SMS and/or email one day prior to delivery that a parcel is on its way to them. Depending on the Express product which has been selected, the message reads for example: "Your shipment will be delivered by 12 pm on Saturday."
On the morning of the delivery, consignees receive an SMS or e-mail day informing them of the precise hour during which the shipment will arrive, with the forecast being even shortened to 30 minutes in the course of delivery. In addition, they can track their shipment with DPD's online, map-based live tracking function.
Consignees who know they won't be at home at the time of delivery can instruct DPD via the app or the online platform paketnavigator.de to deposit the parcel at a secure place specified by them (for example in the garage or the garden shed). Such a “deposit okay” can be provided for an individual shipment or for all deliveries, and shippers can, if necessary, make this option available at the checkout. As a further delivery option, consignees can also leave their Food parcels with a neighbour of their choice.
In spite of DPD's proactive notifications and flexible delivery options, it can always happen that an individual Food parcel fails to reach the consignee within the specified period of time – for example if the consignee is away from home at short notice. For such cases, DPD offers shippers an option to donate the food shipments which couldn’t be delivered to a local food bank. "In the case of perishable goods, returning them to the consignor generally doesn't make sense", Reß explained, adding: "We therefore cooperate with food banks to make sure that food can be put to good use locally."
According to consumer research organisation GfK, food shopping accounts for almost half (48.5%) of all consumer spending in Germany. Although in Germany only 1% of this spending is generated online at the moment, the turnover from online food retail is expected to rise from €1.1 billion in 2014 to more than €7 billion a year by 2025. Over the same period, the share of food and drugstore articles in overall online retail is expected to double from 8% to 16%.
According to a comprehensive study published by Ernst & Young in May 2017, 16% of German consumers purchase groceries online at present and 1.4% of all consumers do most of their grocery shopping online.
For the year 2016, DPDgroup’s E-Shopper Barometer indicated that consumers throughout Europe spent on average significantly more than €50 per food order online. From January to October 2016, about 14% of all European online shoppers had purchased fresh food on the Internet at least once. According to the E-Shopper Barometer, the e-food market is most developed in the UK: 21% of British online shoppers order fresh food or drinks on the Internet at least once a month, while the online share of overall food shopping is already as much as 12.1%.
