[austinwm]

"...a car that is empty on the way to the store, and has 1-4 bags in it on the way back."

This may be true in general, but is not the average means of grocery transportation in their initial target markets of central New York and Paris. Dense urban centers are well-suited for efficient or zero-emission (bike courier, for instance) shipping schemes though. What retail placement of the same offers in an urban environment is actually convenience because it's easier to walk into the shop below your apartment than to schedule and wait for a delivery.

The problem to be solved here is extractive raw material waste from single-use packaging. Ecological shipping cost is non-zero, but there are zero-emission alternatives already available. Convenient zero-waste consumables, however, do not yet exist at scale.

I'm not holding my breath, but it would be huge if one or more of these large brands bet big on a zero-packaging distribution mechanism and actually pulled their packaged products from the shelves. At a certain scale that would probably increase profit margins because it reduces raw material input costs.