🚚 Delivery

Delivery is the last step: the product reaches the buyer. Most often people buy milk at the shop themselves and carry it home. But couriers also bring food — from shops, from farms and from delivery services.

For chilled foods, this is a weak spot in the cold chain. In a bag, in a car or on the doorstep, milk warms up quickly, and its shelf life gets shorter. So chilled products travel in insulated vans and bags, and at home they go straight into the fridge.

Milk delivery to the home is an old tradition. In Great Britain, milkmen delivered milk from about 1860, when railways began bringing it into the cities. At first milk was poured from churns into jugs, and from the late 19th century bottles were left on the doorstep. Then fridges and supermarkets arrived, and delivery nearly disappeared. In the United States, its share fell from 54% of milk sales in 1954 to almost 7% in 1975, and by 2005 only about 0.4% of buyers got milk delivered. In 2020, during the pandemic, demand for delivery rose again.