Troops, military families and veterans in the U.S. may be able to have their commissary groceries delivered right to their front door this summer, according to the Defense Commissary Agency.
The home deliveries, set to begin in late summer, are planned as an expansion of the agency's COVID-19 pandemic-era accessibility program and would be provided within a 20-mile radius of commissaries at bases in the continental U.S., Tressa Smith, a DeCA spokesperson, told Military.com in an email.
During the pandemic, the agency created the "Click2Go" program so patrons could order food from home and pick it up, limiting contact with others. This new delivery feature will similarly be available through DeCA's website and its "Commissary Click2Go" application.
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"The plan is to eventually deliver groceries from all commissaries in the continental U.S. to customers on and off base, in barracks or housing, and offices," Smith said of the program. Because of regulation differences overseas, the program will not be available outside of the continental U.S.
No contract has been awarded yet regarding who will provide the delivery services, Smith told Military.com. "The delivery solicitation is in the contract sensitive stages with a goal of having the solicitation on sam.gov by late April," she added, referring to a federal website for contractors.
The home delivery system has already been tested at eight locations, including commissaries at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, Fort Liberty South in North Carolina, and MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.
In August, John Hall, the then-new director of DeCA, told Military.com that Click2Go needed to be overhauled to make it more user-friendly. Commissaries were doing just around 1% of sales online versus the industry average of about 10%, he said, adding that DeCA needed to greatly grow that capability.
Smith said that is being addressed with this new feature.
"The Defense Commissary Agency has made doorstep delivery an important aspect of the agency's efforts to make it more convenient for customers to use their commissary benefit," Smith said. "Across our agency, we have a renewed focus on customer service -- every decision we make is through the eyes of our patron -- striving to meet their needs, be it extended hours, special orders or commissary delivery."
The home delivery system is part of a series of changes the agency has made over the last few years in an attempt to better serve more veterans and troops. In addition to working to update overall store facilities, commissaries are switching to environmentally friendly multi-use shopping bags and offering quick healthy-food kiosks at certain Army installations.
The hope is that an expanded home delivery service will increase commissaries' reach and, consequently, their funding by being more accessible to the 4.1 million disabled veterans who were given commissary access as of 2020.
"Any veteran with any level percentage of service-connected disability -- it can be a 0%, 5%, it doesn't matter," DeCA's senior enlisted adviser, Marine Sgt. Major Michael Saucedo, said in July at the Veterans of Foreign Wars conference in Phoenix. "If you have a service-connected disability rating, they now have access to the commissary benefit for the rest of their life."
Editor's note: This story was updated with an additional statement from the Defense Commissary Agency.
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