Ocado bottled water ban
Online grocer cuts heavy bulk packs so it can deliver to 6,000 more homes
ONLINE supermarket Ocado has removed bottled water from its deliveries to make space for other products.
The grocer said banning the heavy and bulky item from home deliveries will allow them to deliver to up to 6,000 extra homes a week.
The company said: ‘During the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve stopped selling bulky, heavy bottled water. This small step frees up extra space in our vans, and allows us to deliver to 6,000 extra homes a week.’
The move comes as retailers desperately try to adapt to feed the public. Ocado said the demand they had experienced was like trying to serve everyone at Glastonbury Festival every hour of every day for two weeks.
As a result it struggled to keep up with requests for home deliveries and had to stop taking new customers in early March, before suspending the website for two days to prepare for an onslaught of orders.
The company delivered to 250,000 homes across the UK last week – prioritising vulnerable customers. The water bottles involved are both plastic and glass, so the move will dramatically reduce levels of plastic waste.
For more than adecade the Daily Mail has campaigned to curb the use of unnecessary plastic.
And in 2017 the paper launched its Turn The Tide On Plastic campaign and started a global conversation about how we’re flooding the world’s seas with waste.
Ocado also said it had stopped selling flowers as they too took up too much space.
To ensure the safety of staff and customers the supermarket has put in place additional health and hygiene measures.
These include temperature checks of all staff at the start of every shift, increased supplies of personal hygiene products and stricter cleaning regimes across all sites. Drivers have also stopped taking shopping into people’s homes and have paused collecting carrier bags for the time being.
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‘Also stopped selling flowers’