Services · Mobile app development · Grocery apps
Codeeo provides grocery app development UK retailers can roll out beyond a single town. We design and build shopper apps, picking and driver apps and a central back office for regional supermarket groups, convenience and symbol store networks, specialist grocers and food wholesalers. Each build accounts for the national rules a grocer sells under: UK GDPR, food information and allergen duties, price marking, alcohol licensing that differs between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the restrictions on promoting foods high in fat, sugar or salt.
A grocery app that works in one store often breaks at the third. We plan for multiple sites, licences and delivery models from the first discovery call, even if launch begins in one place. That is the difference between grocery delivery app development UK networks can grow with and a single shop app stretched too far.
200+ companies servedFrom a first store to an ADX listed developer
What the app can include
Running grocery delivery in one city is an operations problem. Running it across a country adds compliance, data and governance problems on top. The rules that apply to a basket in Glasgow are not identical to those in Cardiff or Belfast, payment preferences shift by customer group, and each new site brings its own licence, staff and delivery area. The list below is aimed at operators planning or already running several sites. We usually phase it: core ordering, picking, delivery and compliance first in a pilot region, then multi-site routing, loyalty and analytics as the network grows. We fit the build around the systems you already run, such as an EPOS, a warehouse management system or an ERP, and avoid replacing tools your stores rely on unless there is a clear reason to.
Each site is tagged with its nation and licensing authority, so the app applies the right alcohol rules, permitted hours and promotion settings for that location. Stores in Scotland can follow minimum unit pricing and their licensing board conditions, while stores in England follow their own council licence and the English placement rules.
One app that respects different rules across the four nations.
Mandatory food information, including the 14 allergens, ingredients and storage instructions, appears on each product before checkout and travels with the order. Distance selling rules require that information to be available before purchase and at delivery, so the app reads it from your product data rather than relying on photos of packs.
Shoppers see allergen details before they buy, every time.
For medium and large businesses in England, rules restrict where products high in fat, sugar or salt can be promoted online, including home pages, favourite product pages and checkout. The back office tags products in scope and keeps them out of restricted placements and any promotion types your legal team marks as off limits.
Merchandising that stays within the promotion rules.
Alcohol, knives, tobacco, vapes, solvents and other restricted products carry age flags. The app collects a declaration at checkout and the driver app requires an ID check at the door, following the Challenge 25 approach common in licence conditions, with refused deliveries logged and stock returned.
Consistent age checks across every site and driver.
Cards with strong customer authentication, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal cover most shoppers. Open Banking pay by bank can be added for customers who prefer it, and trade accounts can pay on invoice. Payment data stays with the provider, and refunds for missing or substituted lines go back to the original method automatically.
Familiar ways to pay, with clean reconciliation.
Orders route to the store or warehouse that holds the stock and can deliver in time, with fallback rules when a site runs short. Regional managers set slots and capacity for their sites, while head office controls prices, ranges and promotions centrally or by region.
A network that behaves like one service to the shopper.
Unit prices show alongside selling prices, as the Price Marking Order expects. Terms explain how cancellation works, including the exemption for perishable goods under the Consumer Contracts Regulations, and how refunds for damaged or missing items are handled through the app.
Clear pricing and terms that shoppers and regulators can follow.
Grocery delivery is relied on by older and disabled people more than most services. We design and test to WCAG 2.2 AA with VoiceOver and TalkBack, readable text, strong contrast and simple flows, which also supports your duties under the Equality Act 2010.
An app more customers can use without help.
Points, member prices and personalised offers can run across all sites, with marketing consent captured separately under PECR. Offer rules can exclude products in scope of promotion restrictions, so loyalty mechanics never break the rules your compliance team has signed off.
Repeat custom without compliance surprises.
Dashboards show orders, basket size, substitutions, failed deliveries and refunds by site, region and nation. Data can export to your BI tools, so operations, finance and compliance teams work from the same figures. Compliance views list ID refusals, allergen data gaps and products missing unit prices per site, which gives area managers a short weekly list to fix before an inspection or a licence review raises it for them.
A clear view of how each region is performing.
Who this is for
National grocery apps fail for different reasons than local ones. The catalogue is larger, the store network is uneven, and decisions need sign-off from operations, legal and finance. We have shaped our process around those realities, which is what online grocery app development UK boards tend to ask about first. These are the four organisations we most often work with when the scope is national or regional rather than one town.
You run stores across one or two regions and want a delivery and collection app that works from each of them. We start with a pilot region, prove the picking and delivery flow, then roll out site by site with the same app. Store managers get controls for their own slots and staff, while head office keeps control of prices, ranges and compliance rules.
Prove it in one region, then roll out.
Your stores are often independently owned but share a brand and buying group. We build an app where each store controls its own stock, delivery area and hours, while shoppers see one brand. Licensing is per store, so age checks and alcohol hours follow each owner's licence. The buying group gets network reporting without seeing individual customer data it does not need.
You sell products that are hard to find outside a few cities, and shoppers across the UK order ambient goods for courier delivery. We build national courier shipping for ambient lines, local delivery for chilled goods near your stores, multilingual product names and certification filters, and clear delivery timing by postcode.
You already supply restaurants and retailers and want to sell to households. We build trade and consumer account types on one catalogue, with case quantities, credit and delivery routes for trade, and retail packs, card payment and slots for households. Compliance features for consumer sales, such as allergen display and unit pricing, are added where trade apps often skip them.
One catalogue, two kinds of customer.
How we work together
Codeeo has delivered 200+ projects across the UAE and the US, with a team of 80+ in Dubai, Riyadh and Karachi. Unlike grocery shopping app developers UK buyers may meet in person, we have no UK office and work with UK clients remotely through video calls, shared boards and written records of decisions. A national grocer usually starts with a fixed scope pilot build, then moves to a retainer or a dedicated team for rollout. Cost is driven by the number of apps and sites, catalogue size and data quality, integrations with EPOS, warehouse and ERP systems, compliance features per nation, and how much routing and reporting the network needs.
A defined build with a deadline
We agree what the product has to do, write it down with a price and a date, and build exactly that. Changes are priced before they are made, not discovered on the invoice.
A product that keeps evolving
Named engineers who work your hours, join your standups and stay on the codebase. You direct the backlog; we own the quality of what ships.
Something live that needs looking after
A monthly block of hours for improvements, fixes and the small requests that otherwise wait months. Unused hours carry for a quarter.
Technology
We typically use React Native or Flutter for mobile, a web back office, and cloud hosting in a UK or EU region you control. We connect to your existing EPOS, WMS and ERP through their APIs and use payment providers that support UK strong customer authentication.
01Mobile
02Data and cloud
03Marketing and tracking
We tag each site by nation and authority, and apply rules per site.
Alcohol licensing in England and Wales falls under the Licensing Act 2003, Scotland has the Licensing (Scotland) Act 2005 and minimum unit pricing, and Northern Ireland has its own licensing law. Food rules are largely shared but enforced by the Food Standards Agency and local authorities, with Food Standards Scotland north of the border. HFSS placement rules apply in England. We model these differences in data attached to each site, so the same app behaves correctly wherever the order is fulfilled.
Schedule a free consultation and get a written recommendation, with costs, before you commit to anything.
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