Loblaw rolls out home delivery in Windsor

If you don’t like the trek to the grocery store, you’re in luck.

London and Windsor are the third wave in Ontario for the nation’s largest grocery retailer, which is launching home delivery Thursday in the two Southwestern Ontario cities.

Loblaw is partnering with U.S.based Instacart, an online business that hires “shoppers,” who are really independent contractors. They work on a model similar to ride-sharing giant Uber’s drivers or the people who deliver to your doorstep for takeout food services.

Customers use an app to order items from Loblaw or its Real Canadian Superstore locations.

The Instacart shopper receives the order, picks up the items from the store and then delivers the order to the customer’s door in the requested time frame, which can be as little as an hour.

As you might expect, there’s a cost — a $3.99 delivery fee for orders worth more than $35, plus a service charge amounting to 7.5 per cent of the order’s total price.

It’s a service that more and more consumers want, said Quentin Servais Laval, Instacart’s Torontobased operations manager. “When we have awful weather like we did last weekend, you don’t want to spend two hours in your car and in the grocery store,” said Laval.

The Instacart shoppers receive a delivery and item commission and bonuses for large orders and long driving distances.

Laval said Instacart doesn’t guarantee the price for items on the app will be same as in the store, saying that’s “at the discretion” of the retailer.

Loblaw and Instacart launched the delivery service in Canada in December in the Toronto area, followed last month by Kitchener, Ottawa and St. Catharines.

Laval said the service may do even better in cities like London and Windsor.

“I think there might be more excitement because of the seniors and student population who do not have access to vehicles,” he said.

The new delivery service doesn’t cover other Loblaw-owned chains such as No Frills, ValuMart or Zehrs, but Laval said he expects Instacart delivery to eventually expand to Loblaw-owned stores across Canada.

Loblaw launched a Click and Collect service in London in August 2015, allowing customers to shop for groceries online and pick them up at the store already packed by staff.

That service costs an additional $3 to $5, depending on the day and time of the order.

Only a year ago, Loblaw chief executive Galen Weston expressed some skepticism about the grocery delivery and hinted that Loblaw might stick with Click and Collect.

“We might experiment (with home delivery), but I don’t think anybody has reached that conclusion that it is the best path forward for grocery,” said Weston in a conference call.

But Loblaw is now trying to head off competition from retail giant Walmart, which has aggressively expanded its stores by adding full supermarkets.

Walmart has also launched a grocery delivery service and Click and Collect in Toronto,

Both companies are also competing with future competition from Amazon, which bought the Whole Foods chain and launched AmazonFresh grocery delivery in the U.S. — a service that hasn’t yet expanded into Canada.

“That has pushed traditional retailers to rethink their approach to delivery,” said Laval.

Instacart is now active in 200 American cities. It was launched in San Francisco in 2012 by Canadian Apoorva Mehta, a graduate of the University of Waterloo,

Ken Hardy, a marketing expert and professor emeritus at the Ivey Business School at Western University, said Canadians have generally been slower to adapt to e-commerce than Americans, but there appears to be a growing market for online food delivery, including kits of fresh foods that can me be made into meals.