Foodora Market, Norway

Keeping food waste down in the dark store

Toolbox

Advanced date checking

Foodora initially started out in 2015 as a home delivery service for restaurants. A customer can browse restaurants connected to the app and order through it, then a Foodora rider picks up the order and delivers it to your location. Fast forward to now, the service has evolved and now there are Foodora Markets, grocery stores that are only available online, often called dark stores because of their similarities to a regular store, but it’s closed to the public.

Foodora Market Norway started using our digital tools in late 2021, after hearing great things from Foodora Sweden, who started their pilot in late 2020. All 23 Foodora market stores in Sweden now work with our solutions. In Norway, Foodora Market has 10 stores and roughly 100 employees. All of them use our solutions to work more efficiently and to make sure they keep their waste down.

Challenge

Focus areas

Peder Strand, the Supply Chain Manager at Foodora Market says that one of the biggest challenges with running a dark store is that the platform and the store must be aligned and accurate. Since the customer doesn't get to browse the actual store it’s crucial that everything in the behind the scenes is correct.

Hard to ensure that front end and back end is aligned

Important that products is fresh when delivered

The stores opened in 2021 and a lot of their work still lies ahead of them. With a fantastic team they aspire to keep growing and offer an even wider assortment, quicker deliveries and a unique customer experience.

The solution

No expired goods leave the store

A key ingredient to keep control over their assortment is the digital date checking that we provide. Customers that buy their groceries online expect to get the best, since they’re not the one choosing it on the shelf themselves. Normally we actually encourage you to buy those wonky cucumbers and bruised apples from the store, but it should be your choice. Our digital date checking solution makes sure that no expired goods leave the store and allows the colleagues to find risky items early enough to have time to take actions before it’s too late.

The app helps us reduce our food waste. We are also exploring the possibility of using Whywaste's other solutions to cut the waste and be able to do correct markdowns before the expiration date.

– Peder Strand, Supply Chain Manager at Foodora Market Norway

Remote installations - efficient and sustainable

The installation started with a remote on-boarding meeting with the first three stores. Then the other stores managed to install themselves with knowledge transferred internally. We develop all our solutions to be as intuitive and user friendly as possible.

If there is a hiccup, we offer both chat and phone support during office hours, although if you try us out of office hours you most likely get lucky anyway. For us, being able to successfully install our solutions remotely allows for lower costs and higher efficiency for both us and our customers. Less travel also means a lower carbon footprint.

The work to reduce their food waste is an ongoing quest for Foodora. The plan is to keep exploring our end-to-end solution to see if there are more tools that can help them reach their goals.

Results

Providing a solution in tough times

The pandemic and the need for social distancing made sure that the market for home delivery services exploded. The market is changing fast and the future of dark stores looks…’ahem’... bright. Peder Strand says that according to their forecasts the demand for easily accessible and quick delivery food services keeps on going up and they see no indications that the end of social distancing should slow them down. In Stockholm, Foodora recently introduced an autonomous delivery robot in its fleet. The droid is called Doora and delivers anything from household goods, groceries and more. It seems like the future is here.

Wanna read more about dark stores? We have a blog post here.