Photos: Tesco pilots 'virtual store' for Gatwick airport travellers

Tesco has set up what it calls an "interactive virtual grocery store" at Gatwick to persuade air travellers to buy food for delivery on their return home.

On Monday, it switched on 10 digital displays around the airport's North Terminal departure lounge - four 'fridges' for perishables and six 'cupboards'. They will stay up for two weeks for the pilot.

People can swipe the screens to browse 80 Tesco grocery products. Once they have found a product they want, they can add it to a shopping list using the barcode scanner in Tesco's smartphone app.

"It's a chance to showcase what we can do to the 30,000 people a day who will depart from Gatwick’s North Terminal, many of whom will have a genuine need to fill their fridges when they get home," Tesco's internet retailing director, Ken Towle, said in a statement.

The Gatwick pilot follows Tesco's launch of a virtual store in South Korea in 2011. South Korean commuters and customers shopped at bus stops and in subways by pointing phones at billboards.

The supermarket is the largest in the UK with almost one-third of sales, followed by Asda.