When I first saw the Fresh Portal at CES, I thought it made a whole lotta sense. After all, what food-ordering families wouldn’t appreciate the ability to keep groceries or restaurant-delivered food cold or warm until they arrive home from work?
But the idea behind the Fresh Portal isn’t exactly new. In fact, you can go back as far as the early 1900s to find a predecessor in the milk door. Milk doors were built into homes when the milkman was as common as the mailman, an early version of a storage locker where that weekly delivery of milk could be stored until ready for pickup. Like the Fresh Portal, the milk door was actually two doors, one on both the outside and inside with the storage cavity in between.
Fresh Portal founder Jeremy High is aware of the history of home delivery storage lockers. In a recent interview with The Spoon, he said his product is a modern, high-tech take on the old-timey milk locker.
“Fresh Portal is a modern twist on that,” High said. “It has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It receives deliveries of the food you’re getting delivered by DoorDash or Instacart, groceries, and even packages.”
Because the Fresh Portal is designed for the modern era of food delivery, it also keeps food hot or cold and has an app that sends notifications to the customer.
“Deliveries stay at the right temperature until you’re ready to get home and deal with them. Fresh Portal is developing a whole new way to interact with the things that you need to live your life.”
High sees the Fresh Portal going into higher-end homes to begin with, not too surprising given High is a home developer. But, over time, he also sees them going into a wide variety of housing types, including condos and apartments.
“We have a multifamily capability as well. If you think about that lobby space where you get deliveries, there’s usually a security door and a second door that’s leading from the lobby to where the residents are. We have a capability that can combine those two.”
While High has taken inspiration from the old-school milkman, he envisions a future world where a more modern version of delivery worker will interact with his product.
“Fresh Portal is going to work with robots and drones,” said High. “As that future is is unfolding, we see that as kind of a future where costs of delivering items to your home will come down because of some new robotic delivery capabilities, and we plan to be on the delivery side of that.”
You can see our full interview with High below. If you’d like to talk to him about Fresh Portal and his ideas for the future of delivery, you can meet him at SKS in just a few weeks. Make sure to get your ticket here.
