Kroger delivery service looks to change the way groceries are bought

METRO ATLANTA — During the pandemic, many people started ordering groceries online. Now there could be a much easier way to get those deliveries to your home.

Channel 2′s Steve Gehlbach got a look inside the new Kroger Deliveries. It works much differently from something like Instacart, where a shopper comes to the store, buys your groceries and delivers them in their own car.

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Think of the Kroger fulfillment center as more than 25 Kroger stores all in one place, and instead of shoppers, two-foot tall robots wheel around, picking up groceries.

“So this is direct delivery from the fulfillment center to the person’s home,” said David Matthews, the general manger for the Kroger fulfillment center.

An actual person packs the order, which gets placed on temperature-controlled delivery vans.

“It takes you an hour to pick 30-50 items, then you have to go checkout, then put in your van or car and drive home. We do all that for you. Takes about 15 minutes to pick 50 items and it’s on your time,” Matthews said.

Kroger Deliveries just launched in metro Atlanta, doing hundreds of orders a day, but it is now ramping up to thousands. While the company offers same-day delivery, most of its orders are mostly for next-day deliveries.

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You simply click on the Kroger app or order on the website and the driver, a Kroger employee, will deliver your grocery bags to your front door.

The cost is a flat $6.95 per order or an annual fee of $59.95 for unlimited deliveries anywhere within a 90 minute drive from the fulfillment center in Forest Park.

“We all know how Atlanta traffic is, so 90 minutes sometimes is 40 miles, sometimes is 50 miles,” Matthews said.

That radius can be as far south as outside Macon, north to Milton and Alpharetta, and from Cobb to North Gwinnett.

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Eventually, Kroger hopes to do 15,000 to 20,000 deliveries each week in metro Atlanta and to change the way we all buy groceries.

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