What: The company's automated kiosks hold pickup orders for multiple grocers and are initially targeting the same city centers where quick commerce has taken off.

Why it is important: Delipop is in many ways the opposite of the 15-minute delivery upstarts that have fanned out across the globe. It's a pickup service, for starters, and order fulfillment happens in a matter of hours, not minutes. It's also chosen to link up with grocers rather than vertically integrate, serving primarily as a logistics partner that brings a full range of groceries into its automated kiosks operating in busy city neighborhoods. Each location will store orders from multiple grocers.

To use the service, shoppers select a Delipop location for pickup when checking out from a grocer like Carrefour — its first announced partner — along with a pickup window that's at least four hours long. They'll receive an alert along with a QR code to access their order when it's ready at the location. When they walk in, a digital avatar greets them on the machine's screen as they approach. Moments later, their order bags appear in a sliding compartment at the base of the machine. Frozen items are available in a separate bank of lockers.

Delipop opened its first location last week in Paris's 16th arrondissement, filling orders from a selection of 15,000 SKUs through Carrefour. Over the next few years, the company plans to open 1,000 locations across France and 500 in the U.K., expanding from their initial urban locations into smaller towns and suburbs.

To gather groceries from its partner retailers, Delipop has trucks that make regular runs collecting pre-packed orders from retailers' stores or fulfillment centers and storing them in the automated system. At the Paris location, trucks make two runs per day, but the plan is to build to three daily runs next year as the service gains traction.

Delipop said the efficiency of aggregating orders, automating service and building out a network of multi-retailer locations results in lower fulfillment costs than traditional delivery and comparable pickup services. The company charges retailers a per-bag fee and retailers in France won't charge shoppers a fee but will require an order minimum.

Pickup depot Delipop launches an alternative to instant delivery