Franprix tests home delivery while customer is away

French supermarket chain Franprix has started tests with delivering groceries to the customer’s home, while the customer isn’t at home during the delivery. Franprix is the first company to test this kind of service in France.

If the experiment is a success, Franprix wants to launch the service in the Parisian region by the end of this year or early 2019, LSA writes. Since the end of April, Franprix has been testing this type of delivery service with a dozen beta testers.

‘People are ready to trust someone in their house’

“We are convinced that urban people are ready to trust someone to enter their home when they are not there”, general manager Jean-Paul Mochet says. He compares the service with Airbnb, which lets unknown tenants enter the users’ homes.

Franprix says it’s the first distributor to test this kind of service in France, but in the US, retailers have already been testing with delivering products at customers’ homes while they aren’t there. For example, Walmart and Amazon have been experimenting with this in partnership with smart lock manufacturers since September and October of last year.

Partnering with concierge service and key guard company

Franprix is also partnering with certain companies to make sure everything goes well while the customer isn’t at home. For this project, it has partnered with two start-ups: concierge service Clac des Doigts and key guard company Oh my Keys!, which is a spinoff of La Poste.

If a customer wants to make use of the service, he sends his shopping list by text to Clac des Doigts. An employee will read and process the message, and will then pick up the customer’s key to this house as well as the desired groceries at a supermarket nearby.

Ambition to set the table for the customer

“By the end of the year, we have the ambition to store the fridge and freezer of our customers and even set the table for a birthday or a dinner for two”, Mochet says.