Milk & More: Sustainable home delivery for the modern age

Milk & More is the UK's leading online grocery and milk delivery company, which delivers to nearly 300,000 homes in Britain through a network of local fulfillment centers across Southern England, The Midlands, and East Anglia. Milk & More products are supplied to customers' doorsteps every morning by around 1000 milkmen and milkwomen. Customers can order from a range of artisan and fresh products, up to 9pm for home delivery by 7 a.m. the next morning, including organic fruit & veg, British cheese, exclusive juices, and a wide variety of milk and milk alternatives – all packaged without any pointless plastic.

In 2018, Milk & More started replacing its diesel fleet with Street Scooters, German-made electric vehicles (EVs). Milk & More was the first company in the UK with a Street Scooter EV fleet. Since then, it has rolled out 500 electric vehicles, which now also include the LDV EV80 electric van.

As far back as early as the 1930s, Milk & More utilized the original electric delivery service vehicle: milk trucks. Today, the company ensures that this Great British tradition continues flourishing with a transition to a nearly all-electric fleet.

The Challenge: Vehicle monitoring and driver behavior analysis

Having introduced EVs for sustainability reasons, Milk & More also needed a telematics solution that could show real-time electric vehicle information to help the team actively manage its fleet of EVs. Information such as state-of-charge (SOC), charging status, and when a recharge is necessary were top of mind. Milk & More also required insight into vehicle location, delivery status, and how its delivery drivers were handling their vehicles en route to and from the fulfillment centers.

Andy Sandison, Head of Fleet at Milk & More, described the three main challenges of managing the EV and internal combustion engine (ICE) fleet:

• "We needed access to real-world information on the use of our EVs so that we don't have to rely on the manufacturer-stated capabilities, which are often quite different to reality.
• As a sustainable business, we wanted to be able to accurately report on the carbon emissions of our fleet operations and the savings that we're making by transitioning to electric vehicles.
• We wanted to assess driver behavior including harsh braking, acceleration, cornering, and speeding, in order to improve the safety of our drivers and other road users, and to optimize the 'fuel' economy of our electric and ICE vehicles."

Geotab's advanced telematics solution, together with the time spent by LEVL Telematics in developing meaningful customized reports that tackled these issues, was a key factor for Milk & More when choosing Geotab to meet its safety, sustainability, and customer service goals.

The Solution: Multi-vehicle support and reporting

In 2019, Milk & More started to install the Geotab GO device on its varying fleet vehicles, serviced and supported by a Geotab Partner - LEVL Telematics. The solution enabled the company to receive real-time telematics information with a particular focus on monitoring driver behavior, reducing fuel and energy use, and measuring the economic and environmental impact of the transition to electric vehicles.

Customized reports in the MyGeotab web-based fleet management software also enabled the Milk & More fulfillment center managers to expand their weekly driver toolbox talks to include reports on safety behavior metrics. This provided drivers with direct feedback and helped identify additional training needs.

Improved driver control for optimal efficiency

While Milk and More's transition to EVs created a great environmental saving, the company recognized that further savings could be made to energy efficiency, driver safety, and EV range by improving driver behavior. Specifically, by reducing instances of harsh braking, acceleration, cornering, and speeding. Through MyGeotab, they had access to dashboards and reports for these important metrics to review trends over time and identify drivers who needed additional training and support.

Compatibility with multiple electric and ICE vehicles

Another critical success factor in rolling out the Geotab platform across the entire fleet was the support functionality it could provide for both EVs and ICE vehicles. Milk & More operates a mixed vehicle fleet, leasing and purchasing vans from various OEMs, and Geotab's open platform is vehicle agnostic. Since Milk & More intends to grow its electric fleet over the next few years, MyGeotab's full support for the widest range of makes and models of EVs on the market was fundamentally important.

Geotab's fleet benchmarking and Green Fleet Dashboard reports enable the operations team to directly compare the relative fuel efficiency of their ICE vehicles and EVs, with electric energy efficiency converted into liters per 100km equivalent (l/100km-e). 

The Result: Greater oversight for improved fleet operations

Through MyGeotab, the Milk & More team now has far greater visibility and control of its fleet operations, across all vehicle types. The active insights provided by customized reports and dashboards enable the team to optimize the fuel and energy performance of drivers and quantify the precise benefits of transitioning to electric vehicles.

Driver behavior has improved significantly with access to simple dashboards for the most important safety metrics, together with the active use of the Driver Challenge App. Speeding incidents have fallen by 21%, which directly reduces the likelihood of at-fault collisions, while also increasing the fuel and energy economy of the vehicles. The resulting fuel and energy savings provided a fast return on investment on the telematics system, and increased EV range by 19%.

Milk & More's electric fleet drives 10 million miles per year, this has saved the company over £2,000,000 ($2,500,000) in fuel costs each year. From a sustainability perspective, the transition to EVs has resulted in annual savings of 1.8 million liters of diesel (476,000 gallons) and 4,920 tons of CO2, as well as a reduction in roadside emissions of fine particulates and other health-impacting gases. This helps protect the health and well-being of the communities that Milk & More serves.

The switch to EVs has also helped to reduce vehicle noise – an important consideration as all Milk & More deliveries are made before 7 a.m.

Next steps

Milk & More is looking to provide its customers with relatable figures on the environmental savings made by having their milk and groceries delivered by its growing fleet of EVs, rather than buying it directly from the supermarket. MyGeotab's accurate carbon emissions data, alongside the support from LEVL Telematics, makes it an achievable goal to showcase the sustainability of the company and to explain the benefits to its customers.

From the Fleet Manager

"The benefit of having Geotab's fleet-management solution is that all the data flows into one stream. This allows us to see every vehicle's performance on one screen, irrespective of vehicle type, which is of real value to our business." - Andy Sandison, Head of Fleet - Milk & More