Deliveroo plans to trial its “Deliveroo Hop” rapid grocery service with supermarket chain Waitrose, Reuters reported Thursday (Feb. 10).
Later this month, Waitrose is opening a delivery-only store in Bermondsey, London, which will be the first location that the service is offered from.
For those living around the dark store location, the Hop service will cut delivery times to around 10 minutes — half of the time that traditional Waitrose deliveries take. Waitrose also has an existing partnership with Deliveroo, which allows for food delivery from 150 Waitrose shops across Britain.
Deliveroo has been using grocery delivery to get to the scale to justify its model, PYMNTS reported last month.
On an earnings call, Deliveroo Chief Financial Officer Adam Miller said the company wanted to “give a sense of the relative unit economics on grocery versus restaurant — not quite as good as restaurant economics.”
See also: Deliveroo Uses Grocery, Ghost Kitchens to Make Its Labor Model Work
When discussing the fourth quarter results, Miller said there were “differences” in the commission and higher consumer fees.
“Grocery’s nearly 100% incremental to our restaurant business, so customers that are ordering groceries — they’re doing that on top of their existing restaurant volume, and it also has benefits on the overall density of the network and smoothing out the work for riders across the day,” he said, per the report.
The U.K. grocery market is different than…
