Grocery and Big Box Editing and Proofreading Services

A customer orders forty items for delivery. Six are out of stock and the system substitutes them: a different brand of the same thing, a larger size, a chicken curry for a chickpea curry, and lactose-free milk replaced with ordinary milk. Two of those are fine, three are annoying, and one is going to make somebody ill.

We edit what grocery and large-format retailers produce — substitution policies and their customer-facing explanations, online order confirmation and amendment communications, allergen and dietary information for substituted items, delivery and slot information, own-label product descriptions, in-store and online price promotion copy, and the messages sent when an order cannot be fulfilled. Our editors work on decisions a picker makes in eleven seconds.

The substitution policy is where an online grocery order succeeds or does something harmful, and its failure is a rule about similarity with no category the system will not cross. Not all substitutions are equally reversible. We work through these so the categories that are never substituted are defined and enforced in the system rather than left to the picker — anything bought for an allergy, an intolerance, a religious requirement or an infant — since a like-for-like rule that treats lactose-free milk as milk is a rule that will eventually hurt somebody; so the customer's own preference is captured per item rather than once for the order, given that somebody may accept any brand of tinned tomatoes and no substitute at all for a birthday cake; so the substitution is communicated before the van arrives with the ability to decline, because a refusal at the door costs the retailer more than the sale; so the reason is given, as "out of stock" and "we substituted for a larger size at the same price" are received very differently; so any price difference is stated with which way it falls and whether the customer pays it; so the picker's guidance is written as decisions rather than principles, with worked examples for the difficult categories; so an unavailable item with no acceptable substitute is refunded automatically rather than replaced with something unwanted; and so the confirmation lists what changed at the top rather than inside a receipt. Policies written this way keep customers and avoid harm.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including operational data, supplier information and customer correspondence. We are editors rather than food safety, allergen or retail advisers, and we offer no view on allergens, substitution decisions or any incident. What we can do is define the line the system must not cross.