In 2019, there can be no question that we are living in an era where delivery is king. Juggernauts like Alibaba and Amazon are eating up a larger and larger share of the retail market every year, and the ease of online ordering coupled with quick, extensive delivery networks facilitated by the post office and high-speed delivery couriers have made it easier than ever to have whatever you shop online.
The ubiquity of delivery has also had a profound impact on how we eat. While hot food delivery has long been a popular option across North America, and delivery is offered as a service by many grocery stores, new technology has had a profoundly disruptive impact on the scope and impact of delivery.
Once simply a perk offered by pizzerias and supermarkets, delivery is now becoming a basic business model for a range of new start-ups that are leveraging the low overhead and low cost of entry involved in doing business online to offer a more bespoke selection of products.
If you want a case study for how these kinds of companies are changing the nature of delivery in North America, check out this story about a Canadian delivery service that is pioneering a new way for people to purchase fresh meat.
When it first got going three years ago, truLOCAL was a scrappy start-up that had a unique vision: what if all Canadians could order a wide selection of local meats, sourced from sustainable, environmentally friendly farms in their own province?
While local meat delivery already existed in some parts of the country, most services usually required people to place large, one-time orders for a portion of a cow or pig, which meant that customers needed to have freezer space to store large amounts of meat. Those that didn’t often used contracts and subscription plans that didn’t give customers a lot of flexibility.
With truLOCAL, shoppers can browse the products on offer and put together their own custom meat box using truLOCAL’s easy-to-use points system, and have their order delivered directly to their door anywhere in the Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia.
Because truLOCAL offers full transparency around where they source their products from, shoppers know exactly which farm their meat is coming from. And because the meat comes in refrigerated boxes, they don’t need to worry about being home to receive the order themselves.
Insofar as they offer a more flexible and intuitive way or purchasing food, services like truLOCAL represent the next level of the evolution of food delivery. As such, they are already proving to be instrumental in re-writing the rules for how North Americans order and eat food.
While the full effects of what this will mean for the North American economy have yet to be seen, one thing is clear: specialized services like truLOCAL, which offer customers a better range of products, greater choice, and more flexibility, are rapidly becoming the go-to option for people who want high quality food delivered in the most convenient way possible.
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