Tesco is upgrading its rapid grocery delivery service Whoosh to offer full-basket shops, The Grocer can reveal.
Order sizes for Whoosh deliveries had been restricted by the size and weight that could be safely carried on the back of a moped.
But in select stores – understood to number in the hundreds – at certain times of day the upper limit on order size has been removed.
The immediate, full-basket offering has been enabled in part by Tesco’s delivery partner Stuart and its network of car and van driving couriers. The availability of the Whoosh full-basket offering is dependent on whether there are couriers with larger vehicles in the area when the customer is filling their basket on the Tesco app.
The Whoosh service now also allows shoppers to schedule a delivery for later the same day, from selected stores. It is understood this option will be available in 700 Tesco stores by the end of the year.
The unrestricted Whoosh order size will typically be available to those scheduling for their order to arrive later the same day, it is understood.
“If you’re closer to a large Tesco store, you could literally order anything you want,” Stuart CEO Cornelia Raportaru told The Grocer.
“Our strategy has been to push on innovation and do things no one else is doing,” she added. “One example is large baskets – the appreciation that [shoppers] want to order a large basket for same-day delivery and not have to wait two days. Today in the UK, there’s almost no one except Stuart that has that capability that is cost-effective on all sides and rewarding also for the courier partners.”
Like with other Whoosh orders, delivery is set at £2.99 for the larger basket orders with no additional service charge.
Tesco launched Whoosh in 2021, initially from a handful of stores, for what Tesco CEO Ken Murphy revealed to be “a handful of millions”.
It’s now available in over 1,500 stores – among them around 180 larger format stores – covering around 70% of the population.
“It’s now a really meaningful business,” Murphy told analysts in results call earlier this month. “It’s now growing at a really rapid rate. It has, we believe, some real competitive advantage that we want to exploit. So, you can see further investment in that. I think there’s quite a long way to go before we would say that model is mature.”
The supermarket revealed Whoosh orders are up nearly 60% year on year with an increased number of active customers and basket sizes.
“We think we’re about, say, 25% into the opportunity for Whoosh,” Murphy added.
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