How Home Grocery Delivery and Focus on Fresh Foods are Changing Refrigerated Transportation
Morgan’s home grocery delivery body is designed for smaller delivery vehicles. Photo: Morgan Corp.
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The way Americans get their groceries is changing. According to Statistica, U.S. online grocery sales amounted to about $14.2 in 2017 and are expected to rise to nearly $30 billion by 2021.
Meal kits are currently a $2.2 billion business and will grow 25-30% annually over the next 5 years, according to Parcelpending.com, as startups like BlueApron and Hello Fresh provide boxed meal kit services as alternatives to eating take-out meals or cooking totally from scratch. After Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods last year, the e-commerce giant recently began to offer same-day delivery of groceries from Whole Foods in six cities and says it will expand the program to the rest of the country later this year. And Walmart just announced it’s expanding its online grocery delivery service to 100 metropolitan areas by the end of the year.
However, FoodDive.com notes that despite rapid advancements and expansion of grocery click-and-collect and home delivery models, the ongoing struggle to solve the last mile continues.
“Execution and operational hurdles abound in the quest to adequately pick and satisfactorily deliver high-margin perishable products like produce and meat, as well as frozen and refrigerated foods that require controlled temperatures,” reports the website.
“The logistics industry changes as U.S. food consumption patterns change,” notes Mark Ehrlich, director, van product line at Wabash National. “Equipment is changing as modes of transportation shift in response to the consumption trend.”
The Ever-Changing Cold Chain
Final mile and product-specific refrigerated vehicles, including more multi-temp truck bodies, are becoming more useful to meet the ever-changing cold chain.
Paul Jarossy, director of marketing and new business development for Morgan Corp., says the company is engaged with some of the key retailers in the country, “and they don’t really …Read the rest of this story
