Waste-free grocery delivery at home is expensive

Sustainable grocery initiative Loop has been launched in Paris. The initiative allows A-list brand manufacturers and Carrefour to deliver their products at home in re-usable packaging. Unfortunately, waste-free shopping is still quite expensive.

Just the product, not the packaging

Loop is a platform that collaborates with 25 major multinationals to deliver groceries waste-free and in re-usable packaging at home. When you order through the platform, you pay a warranty for the packaging, which will be picked up afterwards for re-use. In other words: shoppers only buy the product and not the packaging, which remains property of the manufacturer. This way, Coca-Cola, Danone, Nestlé and Carrefour’s private labels intend to make progress towards a circular and waste-free economy. In France, this will soon be mandatory.

Today the circular webshop offers a choice between 73 products in the Paris region, but in the autumn, Carrefour intends to integrate the sustainable range into its own webshop, according to Business Insider France.

Up to four times more expensive than the supermarket

The service does come at quite a high price, on top of the warranty – which can be as high as three euros for decorated bottles and jars. Trade journal Linéaires calculated that products can be between two and four times more expensive than they would be in the Carrefour webshop. For example, a one-litre bottle of Coca-Cola costs 3.10 euros, compared to 1.23 euros for an ordinary plastic bottle in the supermarket. A bottle of canola oil from Carrefour Bio costs between 2.54 and 4.75 euros.

The question remains to which extent consumers will be willing to pay extra for a healthier planet. Still, expansion is already on the agenda: Loop has just signed a deal with Tesco to export the concept to the United Kingdom.