Lowes Foods pilots grocery pickup lockers at the workplace

Carolinas grocer Lowes Foods has partnered with Bell and Howell’s QuickCollect Solutions unit to fulfill online grocery orders delivered to temperature-controlled pickup lockers at workplaces.

Winston-Salem, N.C.-based Lowes and QuickCollect have deployed the first set of grocery pickup lockers outside Bell and Howell’s headquarters in Durham, N.C., Bell and Howell said yesterday. Groceries are delivered to the lockers via the Lowes Foods To Go service.

Plans call for the companies to roll out QuickCollect GL pickup lockers to more office and corporate campus locations, enabling employees to order groceries from Lowes online and have them delivered to their worksite for pickup.

Overall, Lowes Foods, a subsidiary of Alex Lee Inc., operates more than 80 supermarkets in North and South Carolina. The grocer noted that the launch of the locker pickup service reflects elevated demand for online grocery shopping and contactless delivery. Lowes has offered curbside pickup and delivery service for nearly 25 years.

“We’re excited to take the foundation we’ve built in grocery delivery and layer in a completely new level of convenience,” Chad Petersen, vice president of e-commerce at Lowes Foods, said in a statement. “Our personal shoppers pick, prepar, and stage orders with the quality and accuracy they would as if they were shopping for their own families. Then we take the convenience of contactless delivery to the next level by partnering with QuickCollect Solutions to mobilize that experience for our guests. We are striving to provide as much ease and convenience as we can to ease the stress of our very busy guests.”

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Currently, Lowes delivers groceries to the QuickCollect lockers outside Bell and Howell’s headquarters three times per week. Orders are placed online through the Lowes Foods To Go service and brought to the lockers on the next delivery day. The modular QuickCollect GL lockers keep food fresh using multiple temperature zones — from heated to frozen — that the grocer can configure remotely. When orders are ready for pickup, Bell and Howell workers are notified via text or email and receive a unique pickup code. Next, they go to the locker, scan the code and retrieve their items.

“In today’s contactless delivery world of ease and convenience, this partnership provides consumers with more pickup and delivery options for their grocery shopping experience,” commented Joe Zuech, vice president of grocery pickup for QuickCollect Solutions. “Our QuickCollect GL lockers are already being used for automated order pickup of fresh food order by grocers, retailers, food banks and farmers markets across North America.”

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