An online grocery firm founded in 2015 and promising delivery to anywhere in the 海角视频 within 60 minutes of an order is to hire 20,000 more staff by Christmas.
Beelivery, which already has 20,000 staff - 4,000 of whom were hired during the Covid lockdown, is a tech platform connecting customers with drivers who, unlike for other similar firms, buy products from the nearest available shop before delivering in 15-90 minutes.
Speaking to BusinessLive, Lee Parkinson, founder and CEO of the Cheshire-based firm, said it covers around 95% of 海角视频 postcodes, and that the current average order delivery time across the country is just 46 minutes.
Mr Parkinson said: "We have a unique business model in the 海角视频 - whereas others rely on signing up shops to their delivery services, our drivers can go to any one - so the customer does not select a particular store, just the products that they want.
"That's all the customer cares about - they don't care where it's purchased from, they just want it quickly. We have the entire convenience store logistics infrastructure of the 海角视频 available to us."
Mr Parkinson, who is 40 and from Macclesfield, set up the company with chairman Yazan Bin Mohammad back in 2015, building on another previous business that provided e-commerce services for local shops.
"We started focusing on providing the service for convenience stores. Speaking to all the stores we had on the platform, they told us their real problem was providing deliveries. Some of them tried it themselves, but really struggled in practice. That's when we saw our market.
"The problem we had to solve was how to provide a delivery service from them as it was clearly something that customers wanted."
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Just five years into business, and the platform is hoping to effectively double its headcount from 20,000 to 40,000 by Christmas - mostly with new self-employed drivers, but also software programmers, data analysts, data scientists and customer service professionals.
The firm delivers all sorts of goods including fresh and frozen meal staples, bakery items, alcohol and home cleaning products.
It has plans for international expansion in the years to come - however Mr Parkinson could not say exactly where.
Mr Parkinson said the Covid lockdown caught the Congleton firm by surprise - but it did mean huge growth, as more and more people wanted groceries delivered direct to their homes. The period also saw them hire 4,000 extra drivers.
"We saw a massive growth of 1,000% over that period. Luckily enough, because of the way that our platform has been built, we were able to immediately satisfy that extra demand from customers."
So did Mr Parkinson foresee such success?
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"It was always the aim," he said.
"We knew that groceries was a massive market, and we knew shopping habits were changing and even back in 2015, people were going from doing 'big shops' to doing more 'top-up shops'.
"I think we would have always reached this level of sales in growth and numbers - but it was accelerated by the lockdown."
Co-founder Mr Bin Mohammad added: "To be of additional assistance at this time of self-isolation, we have already created more weekly delivery slots than are available with Ocado, Asda, Sainsbury or Morrisons and set ourselves the ambitious target to match market leader Tesco’s 1.4m weekly delivery slots by Christmas.”