Kroger wants self-driving cars to deliver your groceries to you at home and is reportedly looking to introduce driverless cars for the task, which would let customers order their groceries from the supermarket chain and allow Kroger to get those orders out to the owners who paid for them without having to factor in more human labor. Kroger is partnering up with autonomous car company Nuro for the initiative and will use its cars to handle the deliveries. This will be in addition to the online ordering initiative it’s going to be setting up with a company called Ocado, which is a British online grocer that it invested in back in May of 2018.
Kroger’s goal is to aggressively roll out its driverless car grocery delivery services sometime later this year. A Fall time frame was noted but no exact dates were given, nor where there any exact locations mentioned in regards to where the service will be available to customers. Kroger did state however, that the areas where the service will spring up will be in regions of the U.S. which it will build its Ocado warehouses as well as regions which are removed from the warehouses by a fair distance. When things begin this Fall though it’s also worth noting that the technology won’t be getting rolled out completely, rather, Kroger will merely be testing the technology at first.
While things may be starting off slow, Kroger has big plans for the autonomous grocery delivery service it wants to offer, and boasts that consumers can expect the service to cover 100-percent of the U.S. at some point in the future. With Kroger looking to aggressively push this new service out it’s possible that it will be offered in more places much quicker than expected. Kroger did not mention how long it would be testing the technology out before it finalizes things, or what it would cost to place and order and have it delivered via this method.