Fresh Food Delivery Options

Any busy housewife or husband who is trying to juggle a job, childcare and running a home, is usually keen to find anything that will save them time.  The last few years have seen a rise in food delivery services.  Last century food delivery was not unheard of, our grannies and great grannies would often have food delivered, or a local fish-man, milkman or grocery van would come round once a week to help stock up the shelves.  These small scale locally sourced producers and delivery men (some of them were women actually, from what I remember) went into decline in most areas in the 80s and 90s.  Our shopping habits changed and the out of town supermarket, with mass produced and processed foods gained massive popularity.  Then everything changed, much to the surprise of the supermarkets.  These days an increasing number of people are looking for locally sourced food, produced and delivered by small suppliers.  

Dazed and Confused

Now a whole range of goods can be bought from this type of producer and supplier, fresh food delivery is, perhaps surprisingly, gaining ground against the supermarkets.  Supermarkets, naturally, have jumped in to fill the demand for food delivery.  You can, quite effectively, cut out the battle of the weekly ‘big shop’ on Saturday morning, and have your weeks supplies delivered.  This can prove cost effective in a number of ways.  It certainly stops you ‘browse shopping’, which basically means that in the semi-dazed state that supermarkets induce, you become victim to the supermarkets subtle advertising tricks.  Shopping online can be a more focussed experience, and you tend to buy what you need, not what you have been persuaded to think you want.

Butchers, Bakers and Candlestick-makers

There are of course, other options when it comes to fresh food delivery.  Some small butchers and bakers – presumably candle stick makers as well – will take your order and deliver it.  There are plenty of these now operating on the internet and you can buy just about all your groceries online.  One new service illustrates that the spirit of enterprise is not dead in the good old British tradesman.  You can now have fresh food, groceries, meat and even pet-food delivered by your local milkman.  This particular food delivery service has some advantages over the competition.  The dairies, faced with the imminent demise of their milk rounds, initially diversified into fruit juice and some other basic products.  However, seeing the rise in demand for fresh food delivery and people’s willingness to buy from smaller, local suppliers, they jumped straight on the, well, milk float. 

Trundling Ahead of the Competition

Your local Milk-person (it is the 21st century) can now deliver a range of goods, ranging from tea to tea towels.  Fresh food delivery services include groceries, cheese, meat, cereals and yogurts.  The service has two advantages over the supermarket version.  The first is that delivery is free, as the dairies have established rounds and so don’t need to charge – even for small orders.  The second is that you can order as late as nine pm, and still expect delivery just as you and the cat are fighting for control of the kitchen. With such late ordering deadlines and complete lack of delivery charge you can order as little as you want, every single day!  Whatever the future of food delivery services holds, it is likely that the good old fashioned milkman will be leading the way, in a sort of trundling, friendly manner!