PocketShop: One-hour grocery deliveries come to the UK

A new UK startup is bringing one-hour grocery deliveries to the UK. PocketShop has opened up to initially serve a handful of postcodes in north London, but plans to expand to cover the whole of the city by the end of the summer.

Super-fast delivery of essential provisions is becoming increasingly popular in the USA, with Instacart, Postmates and even Google all running limited services. Now if you’re in the London Borough of Camden, PocketShop is providing a similar service by way of a well-designed and easy-to-use Web app that is equally at home on a mobile or desktop browser.

PocketShop is being developed by Forward Labs, essentially a ‘foundry’ for new startup ideas, which is based amongst the highly Google-inspired decor of the Forward Internet Group‘s HQ in Camden.

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Having been in private beta for a few weeks, it’s now open for anyone to try. The idea is simple – you choose the items you want from a selection centered around ‘everyday essentials’ like coffee, ready meals, common cooking ingredients and the like. Then you select from one-hour or three-hour delivery and your order goes off to a team of buyers who pick up the items from local convenience stores and bring them to you.

The service is available from 9am to 9pm, Monday to Friday, and one-hour delivery costs £8.65 while three-hour delivery is £5.35. That’s not particularly cheap, but you are paying for the convenience of not having to go and collect the items yourself, after all.

With coverage of London planned to be completed by the end of the summer, PocketShop intends to then start expanding to other UK cities.

Same-day delivery isn’t an entirely new concept in the UK. Former The Next Web Conference Startup Rally contender Shutl has been offering it for a range of retailers for some time now, although grocery suppliers are absent from its current client list. It’s surprising that it’s taken so long for something like PocketShop to appear, although now it’s here, we imagine that the likes of supermarket giant Tesco will be watching with interest to see how it fares.

➤ PocketShop

Also read: Hands on with Instacart, the delivery service that wants to make grocery shopping a snap

And: Google starts trialling Google Shopping Express in San Francisco

Image credit: Thinkstock