In a move that could consign scribbled notes in empty bottles to the scrapheap, Dairy Crest, the milk and cheese group, has launched an internet ordering service which allows households to place orders with the milkman up to five hours before he heads off on his daily round.

The Milk & More service offers a choice of 150 product lines, from milk to organic vegetables and bread, which can be ordered online any time up to 10pm the day before delivery. Dairy Crest guarantees drop-off before 8am, although many orders will be delivered as early as 3am.

Dairy Crest has been quietly testing the service from a depot in Surbiton, the Surrey town, for the last four weeks. It plans to roll the concept out to three more depots in the coming months and will extend it to its national network of 170 depots if the trial is successful.

The company hopes that the service will kick-start a renaissance in home-delivery, which has suffered over the past 20 years. Only 11 per cent of the population have milk delivered to their homes, compared to 85 per cent as recently as the mid-1980s. The decline has co-incided with milk's shelf-life growing longer and the distance between people's homes and supermarkets growing shorter.

Source: The Telegraph