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Freelway continues to secure home deliveries

#vitecherupp
At the end of March, Freelway was highlighted in #vitecherupp because of their transportation and delivery solution, which was primarily aimed at municipalities and regions in need of ensuring home deliveries to the elderly. A lot has happened since then and Freelway's delivery services are now expanding in different parts of Sweden.

For the past year and a half, Freelway has focused heavily on passenger transportation. When the spread of the coronavirus began to hit the economy in Sweden, Freelway quickly made the assessment that this part of the business would be severely affected. Now, a few months later, Freelway finds that they were right to assess the situation. Tobias Forngren, CEO and founder, tells us how it was.

- We see that the assessment we made was very correct. If you look at taxi transportation, for example, it has decreased by 75-90%. What we did there and then was that we pivoted and adapted the existing coordination function for goods deliveries to also work for home deliveries.

A few hours before Freelway had the service ready to be activated, the company was contacted by Mariestad municipality, which was very interested in taking part in the service. Only 14 hours after the first contact between Freelway and Mariestad municipality, it was clear that they wanted the service.

- It was a very exciting time and there was a strong need for the kind of services we deliver. The day after we started working with Mariestad municipality, we got a customer in the private sector. We started the same day with deliveries of food and postal packages, among other things. Since then, it has continued and we have gained more customers who need our service," says Tobias Forngren.

During the spring, Freelway also took part in a Vinnova call for new sustainable delivery solutions. Freelway quickly put together a consortium consisting of Freelway itself, Coop Sweden, Taxi Stockholm, Stora Enso, Closer, Sustainable Innovation, Adaptive Media and the municipalities of Mariestad and Eskilstuna. The project coordinator is Lindholmen Science Park in Gothenburg.

- We quickly put together a strong consortium. Coop Sweden received more deliveries that it did not have time to deliver, and Taxi Stockholm was left without passengers as an unutilized resource. In addition, we have Stora Enso, which has a solution that enables deliveries of refrigerated goods in cars that do not have a cooling system. It is a project that is being scaled up and will provide sustainable home deliveries during and after the spread of the coronavirus," says Tobias Forngren.

Alongside the project with Vinnova, Freelway has also started the service in Södra Årefjällen, where Freelway previously coordinated passenger transport. Now they are instead taking in goods deliveries such as grocery bags and packages to the elderly, risk groups, but also ordinary private individuals. In Södra Årefjällen, two Ica stores and three restaurants are linked to the service. When Åre closed down to visitors due to the coronavirus, the restaurants changed tack and started offering frozen food boxes instead.

-"There is great value in the taxi company or haulage firm being able to run services even though there are no tourists, and in the restaurants being able to stay open so that they don't have to lay off staff. In addition, we are of course helping the risk groups in this way," says Tobias Forngren.