Residential delivery service emphasizing consumer convenience and doorstep handoff, representing the dominant consumer-facing terminology for what logistics professionals call last-mile delivery. For frozen food operations, home delivery encompasses the specific challenges of maintaining cold chain integrity through the complexities of residential access and customer availability.
Consumer vs Logistics Terminology
“Home delivery” resonates with consumers because it describes their experience—products arriving at their residence. The logistics industry prefers “last-mile delivery” because it describes the operational challenge—the final transportation segment to individual addresses. Both terms describe the same service from different perspectives.
Frozen Food Home Delivery Requirements
Home delivery of frozen products requires:
Temperature Maintenance: Mechanical refrigeration maintaining -18°C throughout residential route patterns with multiple stops, varying distances, and unpredictable delays.
Attended Transfer: Unlike ambient parcels that can wait at doorsteps, frozen products require attended delivery ensuring immediate customer receipt and transfer to home freezer storage.
Access Navigation: Residential deliveries involve security gates, apartment buildings, complex access codes, and occasional address ambiguity requiring what3words or GPS coordinates beyond standard street addresses.
Time Window Coordination: Customers must be available for frozen deliveries, requiring delivery window communication and pre-delivery notification systems that ambient deliveries don’t need.
The Ice Pack Problem
Many services marketing “frozen home delivery” use ice packs rather than mechanical refrigeration—adequate for short distances in cool weather, but failing during South African summers when products arrive partially thawed. True temperature-controlled home delivery requires active refrigeration throughout.
Related Terms: Last-Mile Delivery, Refrigerated Home Delivery, Attended Delivery