Trying to order groceries online and wondering why you can’t get a delivery slot?

The answer is that online grocery delivery wasn’t designed for ecommerce.

A thread

You have ~50k grocery stores in the US & each can only do about 100-150 online orders per day. That’s ~7.5M deliveries per day as the total capacity for online grocery delivery.

But nearly the entire US is on lockdown, which is 128 million households.

When the SF Bay Area ordered a shelter-in-place, @farmsteadapp’s order volume grew by 5x & average order size doubled almost overnight.

This meant 10x the items for our team to pick, pack & deliver.

Today, every online grocer is maxed out.

Amazon announced yesterday that even it’s stopped accepting new customers for grocery delivery. https://twitter.com/sarahintampa/status/1249723094790549507

The main bottleneck is that most online grocery delivery is run out of large grocery stores.

Tough places to run ecommerce logistics.

Imagine if buying a shirt online from H&M meant someone had to go to a physical mall to shop for & buy it before delivering it to you.

One simple example: grocery stores organize food by category into aisles, which make sense for consumers.

An efficient ecommerce operation groups items by how often they’re ordered so that you minimize the distance traveled to fulfill orders fast.

The only way brick and mortar grocers can scale their delivery capacity is to open more stores. Many of them have decided to batten down the hatches on their existing business instead of expanding to meet the growing need.

At @farmsteadapp, we believe that grocery delivery should be an inexpensive, reliable utility, like opening the tap to get water.

Our job is to get food to our community in the safest & fastest way possible. It’s a responsibility that we take very seriously. That’s why we’re doing whatever it takes to increase the number of households we can serve everyday.

We can deliver to hundreds of households per day out of our SF hub (which is the size of a 7-Eleven) because we’re built specifically for ecommerce.

We’re now looking to expand to a new space 10x the size so that we can serve many thousands more each day across the Bay Area.

Like Amazon, we’ve had to institute a waitlist for new customers. However, failing to serve the elderly, those with limited mobility, or folks who are otherwise at-risk during this time kept us up at night.

We decided to move at-risk people to the front of the waitlist so that as capacity opens up, they will be served first.

Using an honor system, households can self-identify as at-risk and get moved to the top of the waitlist. https://blog.farmsteadapp.com/blog/next-steps-on-delivery-delays

The positive response has been inspiring, both from at-risk people in dire need of grocery delivery and from customers happy to wait longer knowing that the needy are getting served first.

Grocery delivery has exploded.

Given that our model puts us in a position to scale to meet demand, it’s our responsibility to increase our service levels instead of pulling back, and we thank you for your patience as we do so.