AS people in China retreated indoors in late January to avoid the coronavirus, Alibaba’s supermarket chain Freshippo faced a dilemma: online orders for fruit were soaring but supplies were low.

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 program for locked-down Wuhan.

The company then delivered goods via commissioned buses instead of its usual bike-riding couriers, who deliver individual bags of groceries.

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.

“Nobody saw this coming,” Hou Yi, president of Freshippo, said in an interview. “A whole ton of challenges surfaced.”

Hou 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, which had stocked up ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday to meet the usual surge in demand, sent its inventory of dry goods such as noodles and flour to a warehouse in Shanghai to centralize delivery.

To cope with low staff numbers in stores, the company hired thousands of people from restaurants and shops.

“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.”(SD-Agencies)