There may be no such a thing as a free lunch, but an Essex filling station is offering the next best thing, with Raven’s Budgens Abridge near Romford selling a roast-dinner bundle complete with chicken, potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, mixed vegetables and stuffing – all for just £4.50.
Customers don’t even need to leave the comfort of their home to secure all the ingredients for the perfect cook-at-home roast dinner, with the food being delivered to their door via Booker’s’ Scoot delivery service – which the Albridge store is piloting for the wholesaler.
The roast dinner promotion is a loss-leader aimed at promoting the Scoot app, which Goran Raven, owner of the site, says is proving popular in its first week. “We’re within the M25”, Raven explains, “but we’re a small village, so it’s hard to get an Uber driver or anything like that. This is our answer to that, offering delivery with our own van.”
Raven’s store had already had three orders via the app by the time he left the site after lunch on the day he spoke to us, saying: ”I’m really pleased with that as we’ve never offered this service before, so we’re going from ground zero to where we are.”
Scoot’s delivery fee of £2.99 is in-line with other delivery apps, and while there’s a minimum order of £15, customers are buying far more than this as a rule. “Most orders are taking roast chickens, and our average delivery is about £30 at the moment, though a lot of orders are more like £50”, Raven says. “People are buying good-margin lines from us. We’re selling soap powder, washing-up liquid, toilet paper, things we didn’t expect to be selling to be honest. I thought people would be mainly buying food-to-go items, but they’re using it for their grocery shop instead.”
As promotional initiatives go, the roast dinner is clearly an eye-catchingly effective one: “We’ve got enough for about 20 meals at the moment, and we just keep reordering chickens”, Goran says.
