How Alibaba's Freshippo adapted to keep delivering in virus-hit China

To ease the crunch, Freshippo asked staff to rip up bulk fruit boxes, originally prepared as Lunar New Year gift sets, break them up and sell them individually to serve more locked-down customers.Freshippo, which has about 200 stores across the country and is known as Hema in Chinese, also launched a group-buying scheme for locked-down Wuhan - the epicentre of the outbreak.

Freshippo's measures offer some lessons to retailers in Europe and the United States as they brace for a similar spread of the disease, with panic-buying leaving supermarket shelves stripped of many staples and other essential items.AdvertisementHou said supermarkets might face more difficulties in the United States because most stores were less equipped to deal with large numbers of online orders compared with their counterparts in China.

Freshippo had to obtain special permits to enter and exit Hubei and find volunteers from within its staff to drive trucks into the disease-stricken province, as they faced a mandatory 14-day quarantine after coming back out, Hou said. "We simplified our procedures to make everything easier to understand," Hou said about in-store training."Usually after two hours of instruction, they could hit the ground running."

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