FDBusiness.com

Supermarket group Morrisons has launched its online food offer Morrisons.com that is designed to set new standards for the delivery of fresh food in the UK. The website has gone live and deliveries begin across much of the Midlands on January 10th.

Morrisons is famous for high quality fresh food prepared by butchers, bakers and fishmongers and the online offering will replicate this.

With the Morrisons.com virtual butcher, for example, customers can choose how thickly their steak is cut. Orders will then be expertly prepared by Morrisons Academy-trained butchers in its manufacturing sites.

One of shoppers’ biggest concerns when shopping online is freshness, so Morrisons has introduced its expert review and doorstep check. The expert review is a rosette rating system that gives customers an honest assessment of the quality and seasonality of every item of produce.  The doorstep check allows customers to check the freshness of the products before they accept them.

Other features of the Morrisons.com include:

* Delivery charges will be £1, £3 or £5 depending on whether it is peak, off-peak or standard times. Unlike rival services, Morrisons.com will have predictable charges that do not vary if demand changes.

* Customers will receive a one hour time slot because they have told us that two hours is too long to wait.

Dalton Philips, chief executive of Morrisons, says: “This fresh food offer will be the closest thing on the internet to being in a store and selecting food yourself. Customers do have concerns about buying fresh food online and today we believe we’ve come up with the answer.”

Morrisons expects to be covering 50 per cent of the country by the beginning of 2015.