Trends and challenges in E-grocery

The e-grocery business, i.e. the online purchase and delivery of perishable food items, has many challenges that sets it apart from both, traditional retailers and other e-commerce businesses. Especially, the last-mile distribution has proven to be a major challenge for the service providers since here individual orders consists of many different items which might require special handling and the margins are very thin. This calls for an efficient design of the delivery process. On the other hand, customers usually ask for specific and short delivery windows. This leads to a tradeoff between offering the best possible service to customers and logistics costs. Ongoing trends like same-day delivery push the fulfillment strategy to being more responsive, making the tradeoff faced by e-grocers even more challenging. We investigate different aspects of the field in order to identify opportunities for future research that arise from the above mentioned challenges and trends