Study: Online Grocers Not So Fresh
By Bernice Hurst, Managing Director, Fine Food Network
No one ever said it would be easy. Supermarkets in the U.K. deliver virtually everything a customer can find in-store through their websites. But not everything that is selected and delivered is of the same quality shoppers would choose for themselves.
Research from well respected and trusted consumer champion Which? is generally thorough and its campaigns much appreciated. The recent big announcement that they had found supermarkets using products with early best before dates to fill online customer orders was, not surprisingly, greeted with dismay.
As Which? said, "Online grocery shopping might save you from traipsing around a busy supermarket, but you may have to eat your food sooner than if you shop in the store. Our investigation into the main supermarkets found that foodstuffs bought in stores have, on average, a longer shelf life than those bought online."
Originally highlighted in March 2007, the consumers' association conducted an investigation in October that involved sending shoppers into stores and ordering the same items online, for delivery on the day of the shop visits. Although results varied slightly, in-store visits, on average, delivered best-before dates more than a day later than online.
Which? then asked stores how they pick products for online customers and received uniformly comforting reassurances that personal shoppers are instructed to pick the freshest produce from stores, selecting from the same assortment available directly to customers. Ocado, the online partner for the Waitrose chain, works from a warehouse, which, it says, allows it to deliver the freshest products and remove anything with a date deemed to be too short for customers. Asda did not respond in time for the report's press release.
The supermarkets all assured the press that Which? had used small and unrepresentative samples from which to draw over-generalized conclusions. Relative degrees of truth are always subjective, however, and it is just possible that some pickers on some days packed products that needed to be sold sooner rather than later. Ben Cooper reported on just-food, however, that while such reports could possibly undermine consumer confidence in internet shopping, other indications are that strong growth in online food retailing looks set to continue.
Discussion questions: Could concerns about freshness put a damper on the trend toward online food retailing? Would grocers do better by not offering perishable items for home delivery? Or is it a case of buyer beware?
[Author's commentary] When you rely on other people to do your shopping for you, there are bound to be slip-ups. There will always be unacceptable omissions or replacements as well as things that need to be used too quickly. Some of the supermarket websites give shoppers the opportunity to say whether they want long or short shelf-lives or under-ripe bananas, for example. But there will always be hiccups. In this country at least, customers are generally satisfied with what they get and supermarkets are prompt to apologize and replace or refund items that are unsatisfactory. If customers order perishables, they are accepting a risk that what they get might not be as fresh as anything they select themselves when visiting the store. This is the price they pay for not taking the time to do their own shopping.