Supermarket offers village deliveries

14 March 2000



Supermarket offers village deliveries

STRUGGLING food retailer Somerfield is to offer a distribution service for village shops and other small stores nationwide.

Customers will pay wholesale prices but no delivery charge on orders over 50 in the service, which will be launched on Tuesday (14 March).

Somerfield, which is currently in talks with a number of groups interested in buying it, claims the service is the first of its kind in the UK.

It hopes the scheme will allow smaller food retailers which have trouble getting supplies of fresh food, and have difficulty with bulk orders.

The group operates one of the largest store delivery fleets in the UK, and believes this scheme will utilise this better.

Somerfield has suffered since it merged with Kwik Save in 1998 and is facing intense competition in the retail sector, reports the Financial Times.