Franprix delivers groceries to your fridge

French supermarket chain Franprix is trialing home grocery deliveries when no one is home: the courier will come into your home. In the future, the chain even wants to place the order straight into the fridge.

Supermarket keeps your key

The Paris-based trial mainly focuses on home delivery with the Clac des Doigts service entering your home, even when no one is there.

If you want to order, you send your shopping list to Clac des Doigts, where an employee reads and processes every message alongside a chat bot to speed up the process. The employee will also pick up your key. In the future, it will be possible to order straight from the Franprix app.

In the trial, the chain signed a deal with key guardian service Oh my keys !, which is a spin-off of the French postal services. This way, there is a locker with a customer’s key in the nearest supermarket. For other customers, the chain also paid back part of the costs to install a smart lock.

Enormous boost to customer loyalty

Picking up a key is difficult chore, which is why Franprix needs to get consumer trust for the technology. That also explains why the chain is willing to partially pay for the smart locks.

“We are convince that urbanites are willing to let someone in that they trust, even when they are not there”, CEO Jean-Paul Mochet told LSA. “In order to build that trust, the technology has to offer certain guarantees: the entry code is only available for a few minutes and only for that one time.”

The CEO believes smart locks will become a mainstay of every new home in a few years’ time. He is willing to give it a boost, because in-home delivery will become an incredibly major consumer loyalty feature, he believes. 

Outsmarted Amazon in France

Once the system has access to a customer’s home, the system literally and figuratively opens the door for a range of services. “Our ambitions is to bring groceries to our customers’ fridge and freezer. We even want to deck the table, whether it is a dinner for two or an anniversary with ten people”, Mochet said. 

The service is comparable to Amazon Key, which not only gives delivery services access to customers’ homes, but also services like cleaning aids or people who can do chores. Amazon is already rolling out a system in the United States that allows packages to be brought to parked cars’ trunks.

Franprix will be the first in France to launch this service, which has given it a major advantage, it said. If it turns out to be a success, it would like to expand the service to the entire Île-de-France region by the end of the year  or early 2019. The trial is currently very popular, because participants have order on average two times per week.