24 absolute _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Local online shopping pilot takes off
Hereford has been chosen for a national pilot project which will enable local, independent traders to offer their custom- ers the kind of online shopping that’s currently only avail- able from supermarkets.
Open High Street will support local businesses, offer more choice to shoppers and offer environmental benefi ts but strangely the whole idea has its origins in a completely un- related fi eld which creates an odd link between Hereford- shire and Latin American banana growers! The new system will allow potential customers to visit a single web portal and to buy items from a range of local businesses – butchers, fl orists, greengrocers and so on – and to make a single payment, just as they would when buying online from a big store. The goods would then be picked up from the shops, assembled into a single order and delivered to the shopper’s door or collected by them if they prefer.
Although he didn’t know it at the time, Richard Garnett took the fi rst steps towards Open High Street many years ago when he set up Wisdom Systems to market chemical handling systems. The equipment sits between the contain- ers in which agro-chemicals are delivered and the farm machinery in which they are used and eliminates spillage, residue and other forms of waste. “We now supply 22,000 farms in Germany and every banana plantation in Central and South America,” Richard said.
The success of the closed chemical transfer systems caught the attention of Shell Chemicals who wanted to fi nd a dif- ferent route to market for liquid detergent. The company was aware that it was producing the majority of a number of products sitting on supermarket shelves but getting only a tiny fraction of the revenue compared with the companies adding the colour or scent. That in turn led to Richard’s company working with Asda in an experiment designed to change the way customers bought laundry liquid. The fi rst tentative steps involved shoppers using what looked like a soft drinks vending ma- chine to fi ll – and later refi ll – plastic bottles.
Subsequent developments working with soap giant Unilver and renewed interest from Asda, have seen the system evolve to use fl at plastic packaging rather than bottles – “That’s much easier and cheaper to move around and leads to a 97 per cent reduction in packaging,” Richard said. “You can replace a curtain-sided truck load of bottles to a single pallet.” At the same time trials also changed what the shopper saw on the supermarket shelf with their detergent or fabric softener being delivered from bulk tanks out of sight in the warehouse to a ‘fi lling point’. The next step was to add the water to the concentrated product on site rather than moving water around the country. “Not shipping water to the stores takes one lorry in three off the road,” Richard said. “We built up a reputation with Unilever that we are small enough and fl exible enough to deliver,” he said. “They came up with another project idea to use this refi llable system but possibly not with a supermarket which led to us thinking about how do you get retail goods as effi ciently as possible from the factory to the home?” That question is, in effect, the link between all that has gone before and the new Open High Street venture. “We wanted to do something for local, independent traders that gives them the same convenience for their customers as a supermarket does,” explained Richard. “People chasing off to make emergency purchases becomes very ugly when you look at it from an environmental point of view,” he added. So the fi nal links in the chain from chemical handling in Germany to shopping in Hereford have been put in place and a three-month trial is set to be launched. The fact that Richard’s existing business is in Hereford was only one small factor in choosing the city for the experiment. “What really helped was the Truffl e scheme,” he said. “The fact that you’ve already got traders signed up to a system like that was a key factor.” If Open High Street works here it will be rolled out in other towns and cities. “We’ve had a very positive response to it,” said Richard. As a shining example of how one good idea leads to others, you wouldn’t bet against it.
The Monkland Cafe
Serving good coffee, real tea, lovely cakes, super soups and proper bread and of course a strong bias towards our beautiful cheese...
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