In 2012, French supermarket Franprix launched an ambitious project; supplying 135 of its 350 Parisian stores via the Seine. The project received significant financial and political support from the European Union, the French state, the Parisian region and the port of Paris. It is part of green revolution, and for the one supermarket alone, it has taken as many as 2,600 lorries off the city’s roads each year.
“We’re the only grocery retailer worldwide to use river transport for the final leg of our goods’ journey. We are pioneers,” says Stéphane Tuot, Franprix’s head of logistics.
“The vast majority of our stores are in Paris and its suburbs, forming a dense network. Our main warehouse is a few kilometres away from the city centre, close to Bonneuil-sur-Marne, one of Paris’s main ports. Relying on the Seine seemed logical.”
The company does not hide the fact that, even with some financial support from public stakeholders, it is much more expensive to transport goods via the river instead of the road. Why do it then?
“We want to be ahead of the game; there are more and more constraints on transportation via lorries, and it will only increase in the future,” says Tuot, mentioning the ban on diesel vehicles from 2020, and the possibility of a Parisian congestion charge by the end of Mayor Hidalgo’s term in 2021.
Paris is the busiest inland harbour in the world, and with 20m tonnes of goods conveyed each year, it is also the second largest in Europe for merchandise.
Tuot says his company’s scheme is far from having reached its full capacity: “There is room to have much more merchandise transiting via the Seine, and we hope to announce new partnerships in the near future. In the long term, if we’re accompanied by public bodies and the right investments, there’s room to deliver all of our 350 Parisian stores via the Seine – that’s totally doable.”
The scheme has already demonstrated its efficiency by taking lorries of the road: Franprix calculated it saves the equivalent of 300,000km of road transit, almost 9,000 times the length of Paris’s ring road.
While it remains a drop in an ocean of pollution, the city looks at such urban logistic solutions with great interest.
