NTUC FairPrice pledges donation of S$500,000 to charity through online grocery service
Published on
16 April 2020
FairPrice pledges a donation of up to S$500,000 to Lee Ah Mooi Old Age Home, Metta Welfare Association, Assisi Hospice, Touch Community Services and Food from the Heart, through online grocery orders
FairPrice Online ramps up operation capacity with enhanced safety measures and introduces additional delivery slots to ensure as many customers are able to order groceries online
Singapore, 16 April 2020 – NTUC FairPrice (FairPrice) today announced a pledge to donate up to S$500,000 to help five organisations in need, namely, Lee Ah Mooi Old Age Home, Metta Welfare Association, Assisi Hospice, Touch Community Services and Food from the Heart, through online grocery orders. The funds will provide much needed aid to these organisations, which help less fortunate and vulnerable individuals and families, during the escalating Covid-19 situation where donations to support their social work have diminished.
Beyond doing good, FairPrice has also intensified its efforts to enable more customers to order their groceries online. It has invested heavily over the past two months to upgrade its online grocery infrastructure, and hired and trained about 150 staff to become skilled pickers and packers. This resulted in an increase of 25 per cent in the number of delivery slots available for online customers. In the coming weeks, FairPrice will continue to hire more staff and also further increase its online capacity by another 30 per cent by converting a brick-and-mortar FairPrice store into another dedicated fulfilment centre for online orders, among various other activities.
Mr Seah Kian Peng, Group CEO, FairPrice Group said, “FairPrice continues to invest in our online grocery service to ensure more families in our community are able to have access to their daily essentials. As the Covid-19 situation impacts our lives, it is important also to look out for one another, especially those who may be most affected. We galvanise the community to share in our efforts to do good and play a part for the community.”
To engage the community to do their part for the less fortunate, FairPrice Foundation will match the service fee for all online orders and donate up to S$500,000 to the five organisations. The service fee was first introduced early last month but had been waived. As of 8pm today, this fee of S$3.99 will be applied for all online orders.
Commenting on the service fee, Mr Seah added, “We adopt a transparent pricing approach – there are no hidden mark-ups on products themselves as our online platform maintains uniform prices with our brick-and-mortar stores. The service fee only partially covers the total costs of processing, picking, and packing online grocery orders.”
Ensuring as many customers as possible are able to order groceries online
Over the past two months, the number of online visits to the FairPrice Online site surged by almost threefold. This has placed heavy demands on the existing online grocery infrastructure. Delivery slots are quickly taken up when they are released, leaving many customers with no opportunity to order their daily essentials. To help mitigate this, delivery slots are released throughout the day to offer more opportunities for online customers to place their orders.
Beyond this, FairPrice Online will also introduce a multi-tiered delivery fee structure, to provide more flexibility for shoppers to vary their basket sizes and optimise savings for their online purchases, making online groceries accessible to more households. This will be complemented by the services provided by the current extensive footprint of its brick-and-mortar stores.
The new multi-tiered delivery fee structure for FairPrice Online will be as follows:
