CityQ Executive to Green Delivery Sector: Prove the Business Case, Not the Mission

Magnus Berggren has spent two decades in mobility, and he’s tired of hearing the same excuse. Sustainable last-mile delivery isn’t scaling, the argument goes, because it costs too much — so the answer must be more grants and subsidies. Berggren, Director of Business Development at Norwegian cargo bike maker CityQ, thinks that logic has it backwards.

His challenge to the industry is blunt: if a business model can’t stand on its own commercial merits, subsidies won’t save it. Grant schemes in London, Bristol, Oslo and other cities have helped smaller firms buy cargo bikes, and that’s genuinely useful. But none of them has delivered the scale of change the sector needs.

For real transformation, the heavy hitters — Amazon, DHL and their peers — have to buy in. And they won’t do it out of goodwill toward the planet.

Efficiency first, emissions second

Berggren recounts a conversation with a friend who founded and ran a Nordic online grocery business. He’d pitched cargo bikes for dense urban deliveries more than once. The friend’s reply was candid: stop leading with the green agenda. Running a company means answering to efficiency, and sustainability is a byproduct, not the objective.

“If greater efficiency leads to lower costs and fewer emissions, sustainability follows naturally.”

That framing, Berggren argues, is the one the industry keeps dodging. Online shopping keeps climbing, and retailers are squeezed by delivery costs chewing into thin margins. A genuinely cheaper operating model would be impossible for the market to ignore.

Why 10% won’t cut it

Incremental gains don’t survive contact with reality. A 10-15% cut in operating costs looks fine on a spreadsheet — until you price in the overhaul of an entire operating model, at which point the advantage evaporates.

Berggren’s target is far bolder: 50-60% cost reductions. Ambitious, yes. Impossible, he insists, no. But it can’t come from swapping one vehicle type for another. The whole system has to be rebuilt:

• Vehicles: purpose-built machines for each job, not one design stretched across every use case
• Routing: smarter planning to kill empty runs, detours and wasted hours
• In-house operations: a hard look at how goods are received, sorted and staged for dispatch
• Utilisation: more productive hours, less downtime
• Microhubs: consolidation points closer to the customer
• Data and tech: connecting the pieces so decisions improve over time

The payoff sits in how those elements interact — not in any single piece of hardware.

A century’s head start

Conventional delivery networks have had more than 100 years to sharpen their operations. New entrants can’t close that gap by rolling out different vehicles and crossing their fingers on the economics.

What’s needed, Berggren says, is speed, bigger thinking and cooperation across manufacturers, logistics firms, tech suppliers, retailers, property owners and regulators. The debate itself has to move — away from how the transition gets funded, toward how the new model wins on commercial terms.

The question isn’t how the industry can afford greener delivery. It’s how last-mile delivery gets redesigned to be more efficient, more profitable — and sustainable as a consequence.