IKEA France develops “new delivery system for its customers in inner Paris”

Since December 2022, IKEA has been carrying out its home delivery to customers in Paris  by boat and electric vehicles. The orders are prepared at the distribution centre in the harbour of Gennevilliers (92) and then transported in specific containers by boat to the harbour of Bercy (Paris XII).

They are finally loaded onto electric vehicles to make the “last kilometer” to reach their recipients. This new and innovative multimodal logistics flow aims to reduce the environmental impact of home deliveries and to improve customer satisfaction.

In a context of increasing online sales and the rise of e-commerce, IKEA France is developing a new delivery system for its customers in inner Paris. Using the innovative swap body technology developed by Box2Home, a subsidiary of Warning+, the brand has set up a multimodal home delivery system combining river logistics and electric vehicles. Eventually, 455 orders per day on average, or 35 swap bodies, will be transported via the Seine river.

This new flow allows IKEA to further meet its goal to reduce the environmental footprint of its operations. River freight emits up to 5 times less CO2 than road freight per ton transported2. It reduces the number of kilometers traveled by truck between the Gennevilliers distribution centre and Paris (approximately 300,000 kilometers saved on the road per year). Finally, IKEA will deliver all its Parisian customers by electric vehicle for the last kilometer.

Delivering via the Seine river allows IKEA to avoid urban congestion when entering Paris and thus secure the delivery time. The entire IKEA range can be delivered using this solution3. This service should eventually allow IKEA to offer more daily home delivery slots with a reduced time range.

The Île-de-France region supports this project financially, as part of its Stratégie régionale pour le fret et la logistique (Regional Strategy for Freight and Logistics), through its contribution to the Plan d’aide au report modal de Voies navigables de France4 (Aid scheme for modal shift of navigable waterways of France) and through the support for the development of the Box2home solution and multimodal container.

In the future, this river transport mode will be used to connect the IKEA Customer Distribution Center to the harbour of Limay (78), which will open in 2026.

“We are proud to innovate with our partners to launch the delivery of our Parisian customers via the Seine river! IKEA France is a pioneer in this area, it is a world first for the IKEA Group. With this innovation, which uses Box2Home’s swap bodies, we are taking an important step to support the growth of home deliveries while reducing the environmental impact of our operations. I would like to thank the City of Paris, HAROPA PORT, the Île-de-France region and Voies navigables de France for their assistance and support,” explains Emma Recco, Country Business Development Manager at IKEA France.

“We welcome this new waterway home delivery service launched by IKEA. This innovation is the result of a long-standing partnership between HAROPA PORT and IKEA France which has already materialized in 2019 with the installation of a customer distribution center in a warehouse in the harbour of Gennevilliers and in 2021 with the decision to build a second warehouse in the harbour of Limay-Procheville. Our main harbours in Île-de-France – Gennevilliers, Bonneuil-sur-Marne and Limay – helps us, thanks to river transport, to have low-carbon logistics chains to meet all needs for all types of goods. With 20 million tons loaded annually at our harbours in Île-de-France, nearly 1 million heavy truck journeys are avoided every year while improving the reliability of deliveries,” says Antoine Berbain, Chief Operating Officer at HAROPA PORT | Paris.

“Paris was built thanks to and around the Seine river. In the heart of the city, the river allows us to set up low-emission and low-noise transport, which replaces dozens of trucks” adds Pierre Rabadan, Deputy Mayor of Paris, in charge of Sports, Olympic and Paralympic Games, and the Seine river. “Developing river transport is therefore not an option but a necessity for the City of Paris and we will encourage each project going in this direction. This project of river delivery and then with electric vehicles developed by IKEA France is a perfect example of what we want to support and develop in the future. An innovation which, I hope, will inspire many other economic players.”