I’ve seen the future of food retailing — and it works

It’s simple, this internet grocery shopping. Log on, pick what you want, pay with your credit card and get on with your life while you wait for the doorbell to ring. No need to schlep to the supermarket, fight your way to the checkout, lug all those overloaded plastic bags into the car and out again, to discover that you’ve carefully placed the bananas at the bottom of the heap.

We spend £120 billion a year on groceries, so buying them on the net is such an obvious new market that it’s no wonder lots of people tried to get into it. For some, it has been a miserable, expensive lesson that doing the weekly shop is nothing like as simple as it looks. Webvan, an American pioneer of internet grocery, pledged to go from cow to steak for customers but went bust instead. The supermarkets fight for every pound, the housewife fights for every penny, and it’s no surprise to find that Tesco and J Sainsbury are fighting to dominate the British online food business.