A 40-minute delivery service for M&S food is set to launch in Central London on Friday.
Start-up company Togle will initially deliver to six postcodes in the Kensington and Chelsea area and aims to eventually take its offer to all of Central London.
Togle, which is completely independent from M&S, will make its money by charging a mark-up of up to 15% on the retailer’s products. A brisket of beef costs £8.05 and a chicken arrabbiata ready meal costs £3.45 on the Togle test site, while the same products cost £7 and £3 in M&S stores.
There will also be a £4.50 delivery fee to cover the cost of its employees buying the products from stores and making deliveries.
Togle says it will eventually be able to slash this fee by using “robots” to make deliveries, and is trialling them next month, but co-director Abyl Ikhsanov said it was too early to reveal how they would operate.
At this stage, there appears little prospect of an actual tie-up with M&S. Ikhsanov said the company had already talked to the retailer about its proposition and was seeking “further discussions”, but M&S said it had met with Togle once out of due diligence and had “no further business relationship”.
Ikhsanov and his co-director are both recent graduates and the company has received an undisclosed sum of private funding to get started.
Togle is one of a growing number of third-party online delivery services offering well-known retailer brands to consumers.
On Amazon, independent seller Zig Zag Trading has listed over 1,300 Waitrose products as available for delivery. But the products come at a high mark-up - a 227g pack of Waitrose French blend ground coffee costs £5.69 compared with just £2.59 on Waitrose. There is also a charge of £3.77 for standard UK delivery, which typically dispatches the order in two to three days.
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