Carrefour customer now gets his groceries from the wall. At the Hypermarket of Waterloo, the supermarket started the first automatic food drive where the customer can take his order from a cabinet. The wall containing metal cabinets can hold both fresh products ordered online and dry groceries.
The customer orders products online from the Waterloo shop and can pick them up from the next day. In doing so, he can choose between two times daily: between 11am and 3pm and between 4pm and 11pm. In practice, customers can also collect their orders after 11pm. In total, about 50 orders a day can be collected from the food drive.
To take his purchases at the wall, the customer enters the code he received by text message, scans the QR code that appears on the screen and then pays via the banking app. Once the order is paid, the locker door opens. The customer also receives details of the order and his ticket.
A variant of getting food from the wall was the Wall that Amsterdam-based meal shop Bilder&DeClercq opened at Google's headquarters in Amsterdam a few years ago.
Employees here could order ingredients for dishes for meals at the ordering wall before 4pm daily and pay using an app. A bicycle courier then delivered the ordered fresh ingredients with recipe to the office. Bilder&DeClercq closed the shop this spring and now focuses exclusively on online ordering of meal boxes.
Pick-up at shops
Like several other supermarket formats, Carrefour is already operating food drive pick-up points to make picking up ordered groceries easier. The chain now has about 193 of these automatic pick-up points and plans to open 50 more within the year.
These food drive pick-up locations are only open during shop opening hours. Here, the customer orders online, the delivery is prepared in the shop and then - depending on whether it consists only of dry food or fresh produce or a combination - is placed in one or more cabinets of the automatic drive.
At the new automatic food drive, ordered groceries can be collected more flexibly. Orders placed on Friday with pick-up on Saturday from 4pm to 11pm can also be taken on Sunday. Orders placed on Saturday will be available from Monday.
Carrefour also wants to install the automatic drive in other locations, but has no concrete plans to do so yet. "There are few known dates around such systems, but based on our learning curve in Waterloo, there is indeed a chance that we will expand," the supermarket chain said.
