CARREFOUR opens an automated 'pedestrian driveway' in Paris with Delipop
Delipop equips its locations with fully automated systems from Retail Robotics. The delivery personel identify themselves via QR code or RFID tag to fill the collection boxes.
A fully automated pedestrian drive to collect your shopping, ordered the day before or the same day, in less than 2 minutes. This is the promise of Delipop: French start-up founded by Lukasz Nowinskiet, the founder of Retail Robotics, and Hervé Street, the boss of Star Service. Carrefour, seduced by the proposal, opens a first Delipop pedestrian drive at 194 avenue de Versailles in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. It is possible to come and collect your order there from October 6, 2021.
Same day order
The pedestrian drive is fully automated. You must first place your order on the Carrefour site and request delivery to the Delipop pedestrian driveway. The order can be placed until midnight for the next morning and until 12 noon for delivery in the afternoon. Once the time slot for picking up the order has been chosen, the person has 15 to 20 minutes to complete their order on the Carrefour site. A minimum of 20 euros must be ordered among the 15,000 references. The average basket is 50 to 60 euros on races collected by pedestrian drive. This first pedestrian drive is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. but ultimately the objective is to have an extended time slot from 6 a.m. to midnight.
About sixty orders per day can be collected from this 45 m² location. Two terminals or customer interfaces are present inside with four drawers to collect products and a freezer with numerous bins. To enter the space an access code, which changes every day, is required. Then, all you have to do is scan the QR code received when ordering on the terminal, the customer interface indicates which drawer will open. Then, you have to collect your order, validate the withdrawal and wait for the drawer to close before being able to recover any frozen products in one of the numbered bins which opens automatically when the freezer door is opened.
If one person is present at the moment to make sure everything is going well and to guide customers when needed, no one should be in that role in a month. The idea is to understand the use made by the customers to optimize the service. For example, during the test carried out by Carrefour before the opening of this first place, they realized that it was better to speak of a drawer and not of a bin; that it was important to differentiate the two customer interfaces and the drawers attached to each interface by a color code; that it is better to put the orders in bags and remove the boxes to speed up the recovery time of the races.
Delipop embarque Carrefour dans l’aventure des drives partagés. https://t.co/Z77u8KjYun pic.twitter.com/d49RS6moYC
— LINEAIRES (@LINEAIRES) October 5, 2021
A network of automated and shared pedestrian drives
While this first Delipop automated pedestrian drive is exclusively reserved for Carrefour customers, the start-up’s objective is to pool the opening of pedestrian drives between several retailers. Delipop will then take care of the management of the drive: from finding an ideal location to delivering the last mile from its hubs located in Gennevilliers and Orly, including opening the premises.
Concretely, the risk will weigh on Delipop since retailers will then pay the start-up to order. It is up to it to find places that attract enough customers, knowing that it is possible to carry out up to four times more orders thanks to its automation technology compared to a conventional drive. One of the reasons is the optimization of the storage space located behind the PLC which allows to have more bins containing the different commands. For retailers, beyond the lower risk, this will allow them to have a finer network of the territory to offer such a pedestrian drive service.
When shared venues open their doors, reservations will be made via the sites of each merchant which will be linked in real time to Delipop for the reservation of slots. The start-up wants to open 5 other withdrawal points that will be pooled by the end of the year – another in Paris and 4 in the inner suburbs – 25 by June 2022 and around sixty by the end of 2022. The start-up wants to test different locations such as passageways, cities or dormitory areas, offices, stations, etc. Priority is currently placed on Paris and the inner suburbs, but Delipop would like to test the opening of an automated pedestrian drive-through at least in another large French city.
For the moment Delipop takes 15 days to manufacture the automaton which equips these places. The goal is to reduce the manufacturing time to one week, but the start-up assures us that this is not an obstacle to the deployment of its technology. Delipop being a withdrawal point, it is possible to imagine the withdrawal of other products, whether it is non-food, hot dishes, fresh bread, etc.
Press Release: Massy and Paris, October 5, 2021
Carrefour and Delipop sign a partnership in order to deploy a robotic pedestrian drive-through offer
Carrefour has announced an unprecedented partnership with Delipop to develop a new offering of robotic pedestrian drives. The first pickup point will open in Paris on 6 October.
Carrefour: the first retailer to ever partner with Delipop
Carrefour has become the first retailer to team up with Delipop, a startup specialized in the logistical handling of e-commerce food orders, in order to develop its range of robotic pedestrian Drives. This partnership will be inaugurated by the opening of a first point at 194 avenue de Versailles in Paris in the 16th arrondissement, on 6 October.
A robotic pedestrian drive for easier shopping
This service will therefore develop local e-commerce close to customers, offering a choice of 15,000 product references available on carrefour.fr website. It will allow customers to pick up their orders placed on carrefour.fr on the same day, over a wide range of hours from 8am to 10pm, Monday to Saturday. Prepared in the Carrefour warehouse the orders will be delivered and stored at the Delipop collection point in lockers that respect the cold chain. Once the order has been placed, the customer receives a text message with a code associated with a 100% robotic locker allowing them to collect their basket in less than one or two minutes, depending on the order size.
Carrefour extends its e-commerce offer
Carrefour is committed to accelerating its omnichannel strategy and has pledged to deploy 2 000 ecommerce points of sale by the end of 2021. Thanks to rapid pick-up, wide opening hours and new promotions each week, the pedestrian drive represents a time-saver for consumers and a genuine local service. According to a Cogision study, 44% of Parisians say they would be prepared to use a drive if it were located on their daily commute. A forerunner in the field of pedestrian drives since 2018, Carrefour group is attentive to consumer needs and is thus taking a new step in the implementation of its e-commerce plan with this ambitious new partnership on robotic drives.
European pickup depot Delipop launches an urban alternative to instant delivery
Amid all the buzz over rapid delivery, one colorful European startup is targeting urban, digitally savvy consumers with a very different model of convenience.
Delipop is in many ways the opposite of the 15-minute delivery upstarts that have fanned out across the globe. It’s a pickup service, for starters, and order fulfillment happens in a matter of hours, not minutes. It’s also chosen to link up with grocers rather than vertically integrate, serving primarily as a logistics partner that brings a full range of groceries into its multicolor automated kiosks operating in busy city neighborhoods. Each location will store orders from multiple grocers.
To use the service, shoppers select a Delipop location for pickup when checking out from a grocer like Carrefour — its first announced partner — along with a pickup window that's at least four hours long. They’ll receive an alert along with a QR code to access their order when it's ready at the location. When they walk in, a digital avatar greets them on the machine's screen as they approach, and after they scan in, the partner grocer’s branding that’s associated with their order pops up. Moments later, their order bags appear in a sliding compartment at the base of the machine. Frozen items are available in a separate bank of lockers.
The focus on wider selection, well-known retail brands and flexible pickup windows can win over urban-dwelling consumers just as well as — if not better than — speedy delivery firms, said Neil Lambert, CEO of Delipop U.K.
“We're not competing on time. We're competing on price, convenience, fitting freedom around your day, etc.,” Lambert said. “If you want your groceries in 15 minutes, we're at the opposite end of the spectrum from that. We believe in convenience, but in a different way.”
Delipop opened its first location last week in Paris's 16th arrondissement, filling orders from a selection of 15,000 SKUs through Carrefour. Over the next few years, the company plans to open 1,000 locations across France and 500 in the U.K., expanding from their initial urban locations into smaller towns and suburbs. Eventually, Delipop would like to move to other countries, including the U.S., Chief Marketing Officer Marek Piotrowski said.
Delipop's French division is a joint venture between logistics company Star Service and Retail Robotics, a Polish company that engineers pickup lockers, while the U.K. division is a partnership between Retail Robotics and a smart-cities solutions firm that company officials declined to name.
While the service is at least a few years away from landing stateside, it offers a different model of online shopping convenience that could be worth following as companies race to evolve their services. Delipop also offers a look at the latest in pickup innovation as that service continues to build steam in the U.S.
