The partnership will initially begin with six stores, although more outlets will join the new service during the year.

Iceland, which has around 27 Northern Ireland stores, has started the deliveries from stores in Belfast on Antrim Road, Andersonstown Road, Castle Street and Shankill Road.

Deliveries are also available from Glengormley in Co Antrim and Buncrana Road in Londonderry.

Uber Eats, the food delivery platform, is best-known for connecting with customers and restaurants via its app.

Over 3,000 food products such as fresh groceries, vegetables and ranges such as TGI Fridays, Greggs, Cathedral City, Harry Ramsden’s, Barratts and Slimming World are available for delivery from Iceland through Uber Eats.

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The EPOD (electronic proof of delivery) system will start to roll-out from the end of the month with deliveries from all depots moving to the paperless system by early April.

The change means when partners receive a delivery they will no longer sign and receive paper delivery notes, instead they will write on the glass of a handheld mobile device and the proof of delivery will be automatically emailed to them.

The digital process will begin when the order is picked at the depot with the delivery note of confirmed items generated and sent to the store email address, in advance of the driver arriving.

The confirmed manifest is then loaded onto the system so when the driver arrives at delivery point, they can review the containers to be delivered, scan them off the vehicle and confirm with the partners the safe receipt of the goods.

A single signature from the partner, or store colleague, is required which will generate an electronic record of signature and summary of the delivery for Nisa head office and the partner, eliminating the need for any actual paperwork.

Jess Graves, from Nisa’s Logistics Team, said: “This is a huge step forward for our delivery operation which will simplify and streamline the system making things easier for Nisa partners.

“The new system completely removes the need for all the paperwork involved in the delivery process and will improve record-keeping and efficiency.

“This represents an important technological development for Nisa and our logistics partners DHL and we’re really excited to be rolling it out.”

Scott Swindin, Head of Development at DHL, said “As a partnership DHL and Nisa are always striving to enhance the partner’s delivery experience and the introduction of a digitalised solution such as EPOD will help us all with improved on time delivery information, reduced waiting time, support of media tracking as well as fostering the green agenda with reduced paperwork.”

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Paul Hughes says one of his earliest memories was running in and out of the pharmacy founded by his mother next door to the family home on Enniskillen’s Belmore Street.

“My mother, Laura Joan Hughes, started this pharmacy in 1955 and she worked in it until she was 80 years of age,” he says.

“My earliest memory was that even as a child I was in and out all the time. I was brought up in a pharmacy background and that’s where I developed an interest in it.”

Over the years, Paul became involved in the family business and began working alongside his mother in both the Enniskillen pharmacy and another in Newtownbutler.

Hughes Pharmacy is now a fully rounded healthcare provider, delivering a host of services to the community, and has even won NI Pharmacy of the Year at the Pharmacy in Focus awards in 2017 for its outstanding service to the community, as well as being nominated for three more awards.

“We went from being what you would call a typical pharmacy where you dispense prescriptions and we’re now doing vaccinations, repeat prescriptions, prescription collection and delivery, minor ailments service, blood pressure and blood sugar testing, healthy living advice, oxygen delivery service and smoking cessation service,” Paul says.

Migrating

Many of these services were originally handled by community doctors and nurses but are now migrating to the community pharmacy.

“Fifty years ago we would have been doing prescriptions and cough medicines, now the range of extent of the pharmacy services have vastly increased over the years,” he says.

The recent upheaval of the pandemic brought its own challenges and Paul says the outbreak really pushed pharmacies to the fore.

“All of a sudden we got this situation where people didn’t want to come out of their houses unnecessarily and it became hard to access GP services,” he says.

“Pharmacies generally rose to the challenge and became the first line of healthcare – it was an open door and you didn’t need an appointment and could access services quite easily.”

Long hours

His own staff worked extra hours and hugely ramped up the delivery service.

“They didn’t take holidays or time off because of the demand and I think they deserve to be recognised,” Paul says.

“We were often working to 10 o’clock at night delivering medication – during the pandemic the delivery service became a very big service.

“ We could have been doing 40 or 50 deliveries a day and the vaccination service followed on from that. We’ve done hundreds of Covid vaccinations and now we’re doing flu vaccines.”

Paul says ideally community pharmacies are well placed to deliver further minor ailments services that are currently delivered by GP surgeries.

“People can now come to the pharmacy for minor ailments such as diarrhoea, athlete’s foot, head lice – we can write prescriptions for those,” he says.

“But I do think the minor ailments formula should be increased – we’re now looking at increasing it and maybe bringing in things like UTIs.”

For the full feature, click HERE.

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They say china is the perfect gift to celebrate a 20th anniversary, but the reward for Kearney’s as it approached its 20th year on its site in Randalstown was a serious ramping up of the workload.

Despite the challenges of lockdown, the store continued its same-day delivery service for its customers even when people were struggling to book delivery slots at the bigger multiples, according to store manager Oonagh Kearney..

“Thankfully we were able to get enough stock and we seemed to be getting through quite well with it and getting people what they needed,” she says.

“We had four vans on the road, and the customers emailed or phoned in their orders and they got them that day.”

Deliveries

It’s a telling sign of the affection in which Kearney’s is held that the community rallied round to make sure customers got their deliveries at the height of lockdown.

“Before Covid, we were probably doing in and around 15 deliveries a day, but when Covid hit, we rose to around 120 deliveries on one particular day. It was a massive increase,” Oonagh says.

“Thankfully some of the local clubs stepped in and one or two of them helped us to make the deliveries, including Tir na Nog and Creggan football clubs.

“Also, some local people in the community stepped forward to help and it really showed how Randalstown is really a community where everyone is there to help.

“The deliveries were a massive thing, trying to get that organised, but thankfully our staff stuck by us as well and they all worked really hard through it.

“We had a few isolated cases of Covid where they got it outside of the shop, but thankfully we didn’t have any outbreaks which was good. We found that because we were doing high volumes of deliveries we kept footfall into the shop to a minimum, which protected the staff and everybody felt a little bit safer.”

Presence

Kearney’s has had a presence on that particular site on the main street in Randalstown for the last 20 years, but before that they had a smaller shop, Oonagh says.

“It started off with my great great granny running a shop which was called Scotts at that point. It was a milk bar back then, and then her son, my great uncle Col, took it over and had a fruit and veg shop,” she says.

“And 20 years ago we built the new premises. We had joined Costcutter at that stage and we needed a bigger shop just to evolve the business – at that time there was no other supermarket in the town.

Oonagh is proud of the innovations that the store has undertaken over the years.

“We now have a purpose-built kitchen where we do a lot of our own products. We have our own Kearney’s brands – we don’t supply anyone else, we just do that in our own store,” she says.

The switch to building their own kitchen and making their own food products came in response to changing customer trends, she says.

“People had changed to, rather than making things from scratch themselves, they wanted something that was handy, something they needed to heat, so we found there was a bigger demand for that,” Oonagh says.

A key part of the store’s ethos is its charity work – every year they pick one charity to receive all the money they have raised.

In September, they held a Spinathon just outside the shop which raised £1,875 for AWARE.

To read the full article, click HERE.

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