Stopping on the way home to pick up groceries may soon feel like a NASCAR pit stop for some Chicago-area shoppers.
Fresh Street is the latest retailer to enter the fray, challenging national delivery giants such as Amazon Fresh, and local bricks-and-mortar chains such as Jewel and Mariano’s, which have also beefed up their digital capabilities amid increased demand. What sets the newcomer apart is its sole focus on one fast-growing area of the online grocery business — curbside pickup.
Blake Droesch, an analyst covering retail and e-commerce at eMarketer, said curbside pickup is a “happy medium” for digital grocery services, offering the convenience of online ordering without the added expense of delivery. Fresh Street has 17 employees at its launch, including seven working at the inaugural store. Bootstrapped with $4 million in funding from family and friends, Sayles will be looking to venture capital firms to finance future expansion in the Chicago area and perhaps beyond.
“Curbside pickup is not as logistically difficult as deliveries obviously, but it still requires these grocers to sort of rearrange things in order to meet the demand,” Droesch said.Sayles said traditional 60,000-square-foot bricks-and-mortar grocery stores are not built for curbside pickup, and often farm out online delivery to third-party services such as Instacart, adding a middleman, expense and delays to the process.
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