Kroger, the US's largest supermarket chain, teams up with Nuro, a two-year-old self-driving startup, to launch driverless delivery service later this fall
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
The grocery last-mile race had already gone human-scale: in March, Walmart announced plans to reach 100 cities by year-end using delivery companies staffed with contract workers starting with Uber. Kroger's answer skips the courier layer entirely — it hands the run to Nuro, a two-year-old startup building vehicles designed from the start to carry goods rather than people.
The bet was quickly de-risked: within weeks the pair moved from announcement to public-road testing in Scottsdale, Arizona, making this the first time a major US supermarket chain put driverless grocery delivery into live operation.
First-order effects
- Kroger becomes the first large US grocer to operate a fully driverless delivery service, leapfrogging Walmart's contract-courier model on labor cost per drop.
- Nuro converts a two-year-old startup into the autonomy partner of the country's largest supermarket chain, gaining the retail-scale operating data its vehicles need to mature.
Second-order effects
- Walmart's worker-based delivery economics now face a head-to-head comparison against a fleet with no driver wage, pressuring its delivery partners' pricing.
- Validation in groceries opens adjacent verticals for Nuro — it went on to run a no-charge CVS medication delivery pilot in Houston in 2020, showing pharmacies as a second customer class.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the last mile splits between purpose-built autonomous fleets like Nuro's — which later signed a 10-year Uber Eats deployment deal — and gig-workforce platforms, forcing retailers to hedge across both, as Kroger did by adding an Instacart 30-minute partnership in 2021.
- Retailers shift from owning delivery outright to orchestrating a portfolio of autonomy and courier vendors, with the autonomous-vehicle startup becoming infrastructure rather than a one-off pilot partner.
The trend: Grocery and pharmacy last-mile delivery is splitting between purpose-built autonomous fleets and gig couriers, with major retailers hedging across both as autonomy scales from single-store pilots to multi-year platform deals.