The wintery weather this week has seen Norfolk customers choosing to shop online left without their grocery orders as drivers abandon deliveries.

Icy roads and dangerous driving conditions are being blamed for slowing vans down and causing some to give up entirely.

In Costessey, Matt Sutton waited nearly four hours for his groceries to be delivered by Tesco before being told it would not be arriving.

After picking a 6pm to 8pm delivery slot on Wednesday, he and his partner waited until 9pm to allow for the weather before joining a telephone queue to find out what was wrong.

The 28-year-old, whose 21-month-old daughter's milk was in the shopping order, said: 'During the course of the telephone conversations that I had, both of the Tesco contacts referred to the delivery system being in 'chaos'.'

A customer services worker told his partner that a large number of customers had been affected by the problems.

The couple had to cancel the order and were offered a �15 Tesco voucher which could only be spent online.

Mr Sutton added: 'I am lucky – if I lived in a rural part of the county, or was elderly and reliant on that delivery, it would have been a lot worse.'

Tesco spokesman Rory Stoves said he was unable to say how many customers had had their orders cancelled during this week's wintery conditions.

He added: 'Our Dotcom delivery service is adapting to the bad weather by allowing more time for deliveries and we're doing everything we can to fulfil orders.

'Where we are unable to fulfil orders due to dangerous driving conditions, we are notifying customers by phone and text message.'

He admitted in a small number of cases some customers were not being told about the cancellations and apologised for the inconvenience caused.

A spokesman for Asda said, although some of its deliveries were also running late, drivers were going above and beyond their duty to get shopping to customers.

She added: 'The roads are slow. There may be some delays but we are managing to keep most of them on track.'