The problem on the last mile is not carrying but waiting. The order leaves the vehicle, waits at the building door, waits for the lift, waits while the customer takes their time. The product is exposed for all of it.
A two-stage arrangement
On the vehicle side, an insulated container: orders sit in it by regime and the lid stays shut for the round. On the door side, an EPP thermobox: the individual order is taken into a box and goes to the customer in that.
The split cuts how often the container is opened. Across twenty deliveries the container is not opened twenty times but as many times as orders are transferred into boxes - and the transfer happens inside the vehicle, out of the weather.
Box or container
- One order, short distance, motorcycle courier: EPP thermobox
- Twenty orders in a vehicle, long round: insulated container plus boxes
- Feeding a micro-hub from a dark store: insulated container
- Frozen goods, summer heat, long waits: container on the deep-freeze regime, box to the door
Dark stores and micro-hubs
In quick commerce the chain runs from depot to hub and hub to door rather than depot to store. A hub does not always have a cold room; a closed container works there as a fixed cold point that the individual orders are drawn from.
The record
In home delivery the product is usually handed over without its temperature being measured. If a record is to be kept, the measuring point is inside the container, and the time of transfer into the box and the time of handover belong to the same record.
How it is set up
Send us the number of daily orders, the average order volume and the delivery window, and we will work out how many containers and how many boxes that takes.
