Haulage company boss offers a cool box for home deliveries

A haulage company boss believes he has solved the problem of waiting in for home deliveries with a lockable, refrigerated container.

Stuart Archbold has sunk more than £1m into his Shopbox, despite being told to give up by the stars of BBC's Dragons' Den five years ago.

The Yorkshire entrepreneur turned down an offer from the show's Peter Jones as underpriced and has raised finance from other investors.

Rather than sell direct to consumers, Mr Archbold has agreed trials with supermarkets which are looking to cut delivery costs.

"Retailers have long been bearing the brunt of the massive cost of delivering to homes at predefined time slots, which means that delivery vehicles can end up travelling double the distance they would if they could deliver on the optimum delivery route," he said.

Customers no longer waste hours waiting in or visiting the local Post Office, either.

The box is a metre high and almost as wide and has three compartments. One stores goods at the outside temperature while the other two are insulated and use eutectic, a material with a low freezing point, to keep food cold. "It can hold the average family shop for 12 hours at the right temperature," said Mr Archbold.

The lock can be undone by the delivery driver. The box then sends a message to the homeowner that the goods have arrived.

The original Shopbox was trialled by Tesco. But it involved drilling into people's homes to get power to run a refrigerator and customers agreed with Duncan Bannatyne, another Dragons' Den entrepreneur, that it looked like a wheelie bin.

The boxes can be rented for £2 a week but Mr Archbold believes supermarkets will buy some to rent out at a subsidised rate. He cited research from 2010 estimating that missed deliveries cost £792m a year in the UK alone.

Parcel companies operate on tight margins and items that have to be returned to a depot because no one is in cause severe problems. City Link collapsed last Christmas Eve.

Companies such as Amazon have placed lockers in public buildings and shops while offices have become cluttered with orders from staff who do not want to wait at home.

Amazon is piloting delivery by drone and straight to the boot of Audi cars.

Consultants IGD reported that in 2013 the UK grocery market was worth £169bn, with online grocery shopping accounting for £6.5bn (3.8 per cent) of the total.

However, Tarlok Teji, a retail analyst at Manchester Business School, says Shopbox may be behind the times.

He said: "The weekly shop is in decline. People are looking for convenience, buying that day's meal from a shop on the way home. However, there is an opportunity for ready meals if people could order them in the day and have them waiting when they get home. It is a question of which products they go for."

He said home delivery was still too expensive for retailers to make money from and "click and collect" where products are picked up at a store has become popular.

Nevertheless, US venture capitalists have poured money into technology business aimed at making home delivery more efficient. DoorDash, an app developer in Silicon Valley that orders takeaways, in March raised $40m to branch into other deliveries.

Just Eat, the UK meal delivery website, listed last year with a valuation of £1.5bn.

The Shopbox goes on show at the Home Delivery World conference in London on Tuesday.

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