For the first time in the Baltics – mobile grocery locker

2021-09-29

Retail business technology company StrongPoint at RIGA COMM 2021 exhibition area will present grocery lockers and novelty in Baltics – a grocery locker on wheels.

Lockers are not a new thing and are popular for years. However, the grocery locker’s main difference is that it is created and suitable for food products. It comes with three temperature zones – ambient for any kind of products, chilled for fresh produce (as meat, dairy products, fish etc) and frozen for frozen products (as ice cream, frozen meat, seafood, vegetables etc).

Why? Because in today’s busy life not everyone is happy with having to wait at home for a courier when he will deliver the ordered groceries online. With the grocery locker – order is delivered to it; and customer, driving on the way, for example to home from work, after the gym, after picking kids and so on, just stops for a minute, enters the code that he/she received via sms, takes the products and leaves. Just a minute.

Also, it is a safe way having in mind that we are living in the pandemic background for months and months, since there is no direct contact between persons while bringing the orders to lockers or picking them up.

Another big advantage is speed – both for the customer and retailer. You don’t need to deliver far distances from one customer location to another, all orders are placed at the same location. Customers can get the order quicker for the same logistics reasons.

Grocery lockers can be built inside stores and outdoors – close to the store, close to gas stations, at transport stations, near business hubs and in any other location.

Recently we are seeing a trend that grocery lockers at some sparsely populated areas can even be a substitute for a store. If the population is not high, it is too expensive to build a physical store as there won’t be that many customers, but you need to have the full infrastructure, full staff, etc. And if you place grocery lockers in such areas – the people living there can still get a full range of products available at big online stores. And for a retailer, it is ok to bring the orders to one locker location instead of bringing them home to far away distances where their business wouldn’t pay off.

Where this solution is used? Closest in Estonia – they already have close to 20 grocery lockers built in different locations – both in Tallinn and in sparsely populated areas as mentioned above.

In Lithuania, Barbora has 3 grocery lockers placed in Vilnius – one close to the store, two at gas stations.

An absolute success story is Sweden, where they started their first grocery lockers a few years ago and now you can count almost 200 of them. The majority of grocery retailers already use this solution. Norway is expanding the use of grocery lockers as well. And then the rest of the Europe – different countries are already piloting the solution.

The next step is a mobile grocery locker. All principles and advantages are the same as for grocery lockers. The new thing is that it is transportable and flexible to move anywhere, any time. It is a grocery locker on wheels.

First of all, you don’t need special permissions for building it, the deployment is quicker as it only needs to be plugged into the electricity and connected to the internet. And the flexible and easy movement means that you can move the grocery locker for your needs. For example, a retailer can try different locations and test where it works better, where it is more popular and gets more orders, where less and plan its activities accordingly.

Moreover, seasonality can be taken into account. Let’s say some destinations are popular during the summertime – city residents moving to the nature directions, seaside or other locations during the summertime. You can place a mobile grocery locker on the way where this traffic is active. And during the wintertime, it doesn’t have that popularity? Just drive it to the location in the city.

The reason that it is mobile gives broader possibilities for flexibility.

And StrongPoint already has interesting examples, when such mobile grocery lockers are placed at harbour or mountain areas in Nordics.

And there is no installed yet in the Baltics. This one that we are bringing is the first live example in this region. And the fair participants will have a possibility to try it themselves. And maybe even find a pleasant surprise inside.

StrongPoint is a retail business technology company. The company provides the best technology solutions together with consultative expertise, business management solutions and system integration and maintenance service for retailers. Over 27 years of its work with retail companies, StrongPoint has developed partnership relationships with its clients based on mutual trust and respect and has accumulated solid experience and know-how. With 540 field experts, we are ready to help find the best solution for your needs.