Delivery disruptor to create 20,000 UK jobs before Christmas
Beelivery, the UK’s largest ‘on-demand’ grocery delivery service, says it will create 20,000 UK jobs in the run up to Christmas to meet growing demand for its services.
This news follows the creation of 10,000 driver roles so far in 2020 by Congleton-based Beelivery, netting a total of 30,000 new jobs by the end of the year.
The majority of new roles will be self-employed home-based driver positions which provide the flexibility many want, but, additionally, Beelivery is recruiting for permanent employed software programmers, data analysts, data scientists, operational, customer service and logistics professionals.
The UK lockdown saw many shops temporarily closed, resulting in a growth in online shopping, benefiting services such as Beelivery, which expanded its operation to offer 24 hours a day, seven days per week, 365 days per year delivery of groceries.
Beelivery confirms that online sales as a proportion of all UK retail sales hit a record high of more than 30% in May, before falling back to more than 28% in July, and stabilised in August at the same level.
Beelivery took on thousands of part-time workers during the pandemic, and for many it is now their main source of income.
The creation of these new mainly self-employed home-based new roles will be UK-wide as Beelivery expands its grocery delivery service to more than 400 towns and cities.
Lee Parkinson, founder and chief executive, said: “Our research shows that 63% of towns have populations of less than 20,000 people and many of these towns do not have any grocery delivery service available to them.
“For those fortunate areas who do have a delivery service, many must wait days for a delivery slot.
“Beelivery plugs this gap for these members of the public, offering them delivery between 30-90 minutes from placing your order on our website or app.”
At the centre of the UK-wide job creation programme is Beelivery’s state-of-the-art fulfilment platform.
Beelivery doesn’t own any warehouses or delivery vehicles and, therefore, jobs such as software engineers, human resources, IT and finance specialists, as well as the teams who will pick, pack and ship customer orders, are not tied to any particular location and can be home-based.
The firm says 99% of its staff are home-based, the highest proportion of home-based staff in the industry.
Yazan Bin Mohammad, chairman and co-founder, said: “Due to our unique logistics model, with the largest network of localised self-employed drivers in the UK, we cover cities, towns and villages UK-wide with delivery of grocery essentials, others cannot.
Yazan Bin Mohammad
“To be of additional assistance at this time of self-isolation, we have already created more weekly delivery slots than are available with Ocado, Asda, Sainsbury or Morrisons, and set ourselves the ambitious target to match market leader Tesco’s 1.4 million weekly delivery slots by Christmas.”
As other grocery delivery services struggle to cope with demand, Beelivery says it continues to keep delivery times short and fulfilment rates high through its unique crowd-source delivery model.
It also claims that several of the larger grocery retailers are in discussion to work with Beelivery, to meet their customers’ grocery delivery requirements.
The release of these latest figures follows on from the company’s recent launch of its first-to-market, 24-hour nationwide service which aims to deliver orders within 90 minutes of customers placing their orders.
The current average order delivery time across the UK is only 46 minutes.
Beelivery offers a wide range of products from fresh and frozen meal staples such as meat, fish, bakery items, pantry items, vegetables and fruit, to snacks and alcohol, and home cleaning products.
