Groceries As A Service

Alma is the grocery store I like the most. The pity is it is not close to where I live and it is almost always crowded... So I do not shop there too often. You may imagine my delight when I have recently learned they opened an Internet grocery store - the Alma24. Yesterday I went to check how it works and I am very happy... It took me less than 15 minutes to register and complete the first order. The service is very well engineered, searching and browsing the product catalog is smooth, there are obvious options of adding to cart or adding to shopping lists, converting cart to a shopping list or loading a prepared shopping list to the cart. At the end of the process you select the delivery time by picking one of the available one hour time slots. Somebody must have spent a lot of time and effort working on the user experience, as you do not have to re-confirm anything until you finalize the order.

So now, as it is very likely that I will move my grocery shopping experience to the Web, it is time do to some project planning, ie thinking a little how we - as a family - will plan our on-line shopping. I started by setting up a couple of shopping lists, separate one for each family member, and all of them pointing to my account (I always end up paying for these things anyway...). It works fine so far, as everyone can compose a list of individual desires... The only drawback is you need a PC to do that. And usually grocery desires intensify when you open a refrigerator, not when you sit in front of a computer...

This brings us to the several years old concept of intelligent, connected fridge. Yes, they have even materialized... sort of... I have already seen a couple of fridges with large LCD screens... but I am afraid the user experience is not fully integrated there yet. Correct me please if I am wrong, but I seriously doubt LG or Electrolux or Candy have integrated their fridges with our local Alma24.pl grocery store. And the user experience is the key! Example: I take out the last bottle of milk. It has a barcode, so I should be able to point it in front of a barcode reader integrated in the fridge, the fridge should connect (using my account settings) to my online grocery store. The store obviously knows the barcode means milk, and should offer a number of simple options on the touch screen: order (+quantity), try different (brand of milk) etc... We are not really that far off that vision... Before, the smart fridges were said to have RFID readers and food was required to be RFID - tagged and fridge was to be responsible for predicting I was running out of milk... we do not really need that level of sophistication... Just a simple touch screen well integrated with the backend web service of choice... The fridge manufacturers should just give us a standard, upgradeable web browsers integrated with their touch screens on the door and online grocery stores should build a standard, touch - optimized versions of their GUIs.

Until that happens I will probably devote one Nokia N800 tablet to sit in the kitchen and serve as a virtual grocery store shelf...