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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

grocery delivery

DoorDash Users Can Now Add C-Store Items to Their Restaurant Orders

DoorDash this week launched a new feature, DoubleDash, that lets users bundle items from different businesses like convenience stores together into a single transaction. DoorDash customers can add c-store items to their original restaurant order and checkout with a single transaction and no extra delivery fees, according to a company blog post.

DoubleDash is currently available for 7-Eleven, Walgreens, Wawa, QuickChek, and The Ice Cream Shop. It is also available for orders placed at DoorDash’s DashMart convenience store operation.

Customers placing a restaurant order can look for the DoubleDash option to add items from these stores. Available stores are indicated on the app inside the DoorDash app. Theoretically, orders from these different stores and restaurants are supposed to arrive at the same time, though a line at the bottom of today’s blog post notes that “deliveries may arrive separately.”

In certain cities, DoorDash is also offering DoubleDash for local restaurants. In these markets, users can add “complimentary items” from other restaurants to their existing order. 

All of this is further evidence that DoorDash is very serious about becoming a go-to service for more than just restaurant food. Besides launching DashMart last year, the San Francisco-based company has also launched a grocery delivery service and has existing deals in place with some c-stores. As of this week, DoorDash is also said to be in talks to invest in Germany-based service Gorillas, which offers speedy grocery delivery from small “dark stores” located in dense residential areas.

At the end of last month, DoorDash also opened a new location of its ghost kitchen facility. For now, that operation only delivers restaurant food.

Kroger and Kitchen United Partner to Bring Ghost Kitchens to Grocery Stores

Kitchen United (KU) will expand its ghost kitchen network to include Kroger locations thanks to a just-announced partnership between KU and the grocery retailer. KU kitchens will be located at various Kroger locations, the first of these being at a Ralphs in Los Angeles slated to open this fall. 

Participating Kroger stores will house a KU location that includes “up to six local, regional or national” restaurant brands, according to today’s press release. Customers can order meals from these restaurants via the KU mobile app or onsite at a self-service kiosk. They will have the option to bundle items from different restaurant concepts together into a single order, a concept that KU’s Chief Business Officer Atul Sood recently said was technically complex but extremely important to the future of online ordering.  

While customers can choose to have their meal delivered (via KU’s third-party delivery service partners), the bigger appeal here might be the pickup option. Since the kitchens will be located onsite at stores, Kroger customers can order food while they shop for groceries and simply pick their meal up at the end of their trip.

The partnership is another example of the lines between the restaurant ghost kitchen and the grocery store fading. A year ago, Euromonitor predicted such a shift would happen. In keeping with that, the last several months have seen companies like GoPuff, Ghost Kitchens, and Food Rocket launch initiatives that sit squarely between the grocery and the ghost kitchen.

Moving towards this gray area is intentional on the part of KU. “We are proud to have launched a number of successful ghost kitchen centers across the country, and now we are applying our experience and taking steps to expand in non-traditional ghost kitchen formats such as retail shopping centers and food halls like our newest kitchen center location in Chicago alongside our efforts with Kroger,” Sood noted in a statement. 

He added that KU’s tech stack is an important part of this setup and can optimize “any kitchen setting for streamlined and profitable off-premise business.”

More KU-Kroger locations are planned for the coming months. In the meantime, those interested in learning more about ghost kitchens and the ghost kitchen tech stack can tune into The Spoon’s Restaurant Tech Summit on August 17. The virtual event will feature KU’s CTO Jessi Moss along with many other restaurants, tech companies, and thought leaders in the restaurant space. Grab a ticket here.

Estonia: Ride Hailing Startup Bolt Raises €600M to Get Into Grocer Delivery

Bolt, an Uber-like rideshare company based in Estonia, has raised €600 million (~$713M USD) to branch out into grocery delivery, CNBC reported today. New investors in the round include Sequoia and fund managers Tekne and Ghisallo, along with existing investors G Squared, D1 Capital and Naya. With its new funding, Bolt is now valued at roughly $4.75 billion.

Just like Uber, Bolt saw its ride hailing business decimated by the pandemic last year. Bolt told CNBC that while its ride hailing business has recovered, the company has seen dramatic growth in its grocery delivery business. The company operates 15-minute grocery delivery and has plans to roll the service out to 10 more European countries including Sweden, Portugal and Croatia over the next few months.

But as it does expand its grocery delivery footprint, Bolt will be facing a fiercely competitive, well-funded landscape. Europe in particular has been a hot spot for grocery delivery this past year, with a number of startups bulking up their warchests with hundreds of millions in new funding. Spanish startup Glovo has raised $1.2 billion, Turkey-based Getir has raised $1 billion, Czech-based Rohlik has raised $402 million, and Germany-based Flink has raised $304 million.

The big question now looming for all these services is whether they can economically scale, a matter complicated by the fact that services such as 15-minute grocery delivery are fast becoming a commodity. If there are half a dozen speedy grocery delivery services in a city, customers will likely gravitate towards the cheapest option. This race to the bottom is driving some speedy grocery delivery services here in the U.S. to diversify more into ghost kitchens and private label ready-to-eat meals.

It’s also worth noting that here in the U.S., Uber is investing more heavily in the grocery delivery space. The company recently acquired the remaining 47 percent of grocery delivery startup Cornershop, and partnered with Albertsons to offer grocery delivery in 400 U.S. cities.

Gopuff Confirms Latest $1B Funding Round

Gopuff announced today that it has raised another $1 billion in funding, confirming reports from last week of just such a round. New investors Blackstone’s Horizon platform, Guggenheim Investments, Hedosophia, MSD Partners, and Adage Capital joined with existing investors Fidelity Management and Research Company, Softbank Vision Fund 1, Atreides Management, and Eldridge in the round.

The new money comes just months after Gopuff raised $1.5 billion, in March of this year. With this new haul, Gopuff has now raised $3.4 billion in total and has a $15 billion valuation.

According to a press announcement emailed to The Spoon, Gopuff will use the new money fuel its geographic expansion across North America and further into the UK and Europe. Gopuff currently operates 450 facilities operating in more than 850 cities across the U.S.

Here in the U.S., Gopuff’s massive fundraising this year far surpasses the comparatively paltry sums raised by its speedy grocery delivery competition. JOKR is a distant second with $170 million, Fridge No More raised $15.4 million, Food Rocket raised $2 million and 1520 has raised an undisclosed seed round.

Gopuff will face more stiff competition as they spread across Europe. The speedy grocery delivery scene there is a little more mature — and better funded than their U.S. counterparts. Spain-based Glovo has raised $1.2 billion, Turkey-based Getir raised $1 billion, and Germany-based Gorillas has raised $335.4 million. (Side note: if you want to raise funding for you speedy grocery delivery startup, start your company name with the letter “G.”) And that doesn’t include all the other players like Flink, Weezy, and Jiffy.

But Gopuff isn’t just expanding its footprint. The company is also branchig beyond straight up grocery delivery and into pre-made meals. Gopuff officially launched Gopuff Kitchen last week, and is already serving hot pizza, chicken tenders, salads, coffees and more in cities like Austin, Miami, Nashville, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and San Antonio.

The speedy grocery delivery started in earnest this year. And with $2.5 billion raised in the past six months, Gopuff has armed itself to try and finish them.

Speedy Delivery Grocer 1520 Knows There’s a Lot of Competition (and Where that Competition is Headed Next)

The startup 1520 got its name from its value proposition — to deliver grocery orders to customers in 15 to 20 minutes. The company is not alone in that mission, especially in its hometown of New York City, where a number of fast grocery delivery services have launched this year. Two of those services have raised more than $100 million dollars each. But 1520 co-founders Oleg Shevlyagin and Moucheg Sahakian aren’t too worried about the competition, and have developed their own plan to stand apart from (and stay ahead of) other speedy delivery startups.

Before co-founding 1520, Shevlyagin and Sahakian both worked at Russian tech giant Yandex, where they launched the first three such speedy grocery stores for that company. The two brought that experience with them when they started 1520 in Manhattan in January of this year.

Like others in the space, 1520 operates a number of small, delivery-only grocery stores that carry a limited inventory and have a small delivery radius. The company now serves everything below 96th St. (for those New Yorkers who know what that means), and is eyeing expansion to Long Island City, Jersey City and Hoboken, New Jersey.

During a video chat with Shevlyagin and Sahakian this week, I asked them about the proliferating number of speedy delivery startups and what that means for 1520. “I don’t think that competition adds too much pressure,” Shevlyagin said, “You have 40 grocery chains in New York alone. We have four players in this ultra-fast space.”

Operationally speaking, Shevlyagin said that 1520 is different from other speedy delivery startups in a few ways. First, the company operates slightly smaller dark stores that are only 1,500 to 2,000 sq. feet, compared with the 2,500 to 3,000 sq. ft. stores other services run. Despite these smaller stores, 1520 has a slightly larger delivery radius than its competition. Most speedy services have a delivery radius between 1 and 1.5 miles. Shevlyagin said 1520’s delivery radius is between 2 and 2.5 miles.

This larger delivery radius in turn means more customers. As a comparison, fellow speedy delivery startup Food Rocket says that one of its stores serves 50,000 households, whereas one 1520 store services 90,000 households. It’s hard to say that bigger is better in this scenario. What you gain in footprint, you could lose in speed. Food Rocket delivers in 10 minutes, while 1520 is 15 to 20 minutes. That may not sound like much, but if you’re in the business of treating groceries like an on-demand utility, those extra minutes might cost you extra business.

But Shevlyagin also says 1520 is different from other speedy delivery startups in more existential ways, too. “GoPuff and DashMart are running [a] convenience store rather than full-blown grocery,” Shevlyagin said, “For them it would be more like you are running out of beer and snack. For us, it’s ‘I want to cook my dinner tonight.'”

As such, Shevlyagin said that 1520 is focused on high-quality fresh food and produce. “We do believe urban customers are more concerned about their health,” Shevlyagin said, “They want produce rather than chips and a Coke.” I’m not sure if that’s entirely true. I mean, who doesn’t love the idea of a late night pint of ice cream delivered to your door in minutes? But 1520 is certainly choosing a lane with its fresh food approach.

There are ways in which 1520 is very much like others in the rapidly evolving fast grocery delivery space. Similar to Food Rocket and DashMart, 1520 is moving into ready-to-eat meals, and will offer its own line of sandwiches, salads and microwaveable meals.

Unlike others in the space, 1520 has yet to raise a massive amount of funding. Germany-based Gorillas raised $290 million prior to its U.S. expansion, and New York City-based JOKR just raised $170 million to fuel its own growth.

Shevlyagin said that 1520 has so far raised a Seed round of funding. I asked him if his competition’s now-sizeable warchests were a big concern for him. Shevlyagin was rather matter-of-fact, saying, “As any other venture-backed startup, we will have to raise at some point, probably in the next two to six months.”

But the funding issue also matters as these companies look to expand and gain first-mover advantage in new cities, since there are only so many cities in the U.S. with dense enough populations to support speedy grocery. I asked Shevlyagin how 1520 will roll out to stay ahead of its rising competition. “The real estate world is the biggest barometer,” he said, explaining that they look at real estate listings to see where dark store type spaces are being leased, and by whom. “We know what’s happening in every city in the country.”

Even if other players get to one of 1520’s target markets first, Shevlyagin doesn’t appear too concerned. “It still takes you some time to make sure your supply chain works well,” he said. “We are deep in discussions with other cities. We still have this time.”

Will Gopuff’s (Second) Billion-Dollar Funding Round Make its Grocery Competition Go Poof?

In addition to delivering groceries fast, Gopuff is pretty speedy when it comes to raising big sums of money. Bloomberg and Axios both reported yesterday that Gopuff is raising an additional $1 billion in funding, according to sources familiar with the matter. This new money comes just months after Gopuff raised $1.5 billion in March, and will give the company a $15 billion post-money valuation.

Like others in the space, Gopuff operates a network of dark stores in the U.S. that deliver goods like groceries in 30 minutes, 24 hours a day. But unlike its competition here, Gopuff has raised a ton more money. If this latest round does indeed close next week, the company will have raised nearly $3.5 billion since 2015. By comparison, other speedy grocery services have far less funding: Gorillas has raised $335M, Fridge No More raised $16.9M, JOKR raised $170M, and Food Rocket raised $2M.

Gopuff is also a little different from its competitors in its value proposition. Those other services promise super-fast delivery of groceries in as few as 10 minutes. Because they deliver to a very limited radius, they can tailor their inventories to the particular tastes of the neighborhood they serve. But those services are also very small right now. Three are only in New York City (Gorillas, Fridge No More, JOKR), and two are in San Francisco (Food Rocket, Gorillas). Gopuff, on the other hand, has more than 300 facilities operating in 550 cities across the U.S. With another $1 billion, Gopuff can accelerate its expansion and grab market share before the competition can even get out of their hometown.

But speedy, on-demand grocery delivery will soon become commonplace in big cities, if you believe the CEO of Food Rocket. As such, we are starting to see these speedy grocery services start to differentiate. Food Rocket, for instance, is adding branded ready-to-eat meals and ghost kitchens to make even more types of delivery friendly meals. But there, too, goes Gopuff: the company has been hiring out kitchen staff and managers for its own ghost kitchen services so it can deliver its own meals.

Gopuff’s biggest competitor might actually be DoorDash at this point. DoorDash has a nationwide delivery network and infrastructure, is expanding aggressively into grocery, has a ton of money thanks to its IPO, operates its own growing line of delivery only DashMart convenience stores, and has its own ghost kitchen program. With another billion in the bank, Gopuff has the goods and the cash now to have a go at DoorDash.

I quipped on Linkedin earlier this week that it would be weird if your speedy grocery delivery service didn’t raise over $100 million. Given Gopuff’s furious fundraising pace, I might have to adjust my joke.

No Foolin’, JOKR Raises $170M Series A for Speedy Grocery Delivery

JOKR is the latest speedy grocery delivery startup to have raised a nine-figure round of funding. The company announced today that it has raised a $170 million a Series A round led by GGV Capital, Balderton Capital and Tiger Global Management. Activant Capital, Greycrot, FJ Labs, Kaszek, Monashees and HV Capital also participated.

Like other startups in the space, JOKR operates a network of small, delivery-only grocery stores that carry a limited number of items and have a small delivery radius. With this model [REWORDED, MAKE SURE IT TRACKS], JOKR can tailor inventory to a specific neighborhood, sell local products (i.e., bakery goods), and deliver within 10 to 15 minutes of the customer placing an order.

JOKR’s big fundraise comes just three months after it started operations and a month and half after it launched its grocery delivery services in New York City. According to a press announcement sent to The Spoon, JOKR said that since it started operations it has opened up a new hub roughly every day and now operates 10 hubs in New York, and 100 hubs across nine cities including São Paolo, Brazil; Mexico City, Mexico; Bogota, Colombia; Lima, Peru; Warsaw, Poland; and Vienna, Austria.

Of course, JOKR isn’t the only speedy grocery delivery service bringing in big funding. In fact, it would be odd if JOKR hadn’t raised more than $100 million. Gopuff raised $1.5 billion in March to grow its delivery service. Last month Germany’s Flink raised $240 million, and Turkey’s Getir raised $550 million (after raising $300 million in March). Germany-based Gorillas raised $290 million in March, launched its own U.S. operations in NYC at the end of May, and is already expanding to San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Vitaly Alexandrov, CEO of the San Francisco-based Food Rocket speedy grocery service, recently told me that in order for his business to work, one hub needs to be able to service 50,000 households. That means that at some point not too far off, all of these services are going to be vying for the same markets. Alexandrov said that eventually 10-minute grocery delivery will become a commodity, which is why Food Rocket is looking to differentiate itself with ready to eat meals, ghost kitchens and will eventually open up its logistics and delivery platform to other retailers. Gopuff too, is diversifying by getting into the ghost kitchen business as well.

Despite all this funding, we don’t yet know if or how consumers will take to this new, utility-style model of grocery shopping. Many of these services don’t have order minimums or delivery fees, but will that be sustainable as they scale? Will consumers place large enough orders to keep these businesses going or will these services burn out a la Kozmo.com?

We’ll learn the answers to these questions over the coming months but one thing we know already: Most of these startups won’t fail because of a lack of funding.

Uber Expands Grocery Delivery to 400 US Cities, Adds Albertsons Brands as Partners

Uber’s grocery delivery service is now available in more than 400 cities across the U.S., according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The company has also added Albertsons retail brands to its delivery platform.

The move marks a big jump for Uber, which started its grocery delivery business in the U.S. a little more than a year ago, growing it to 100 cities. With today’s expansion, Uber’s grocery delivery will be available in major markets such as Miami, Dallas, New York City, Washington D.C. and for the first time in California by way of San Francisco.

At the same time, Uber also bulked up its retail partnerships with the addition of Albertsons stores to its platforms. Over the course of this year, Uber will roll out delivery to 1,200 Albertsons stores including Albertsons, Safeway, Jewel-Osco, ACME, Tom Thumb, Randalls and more.

Uber got into the grocery delivery game in July of 2020 following its purchase of a majority stake in Latin American online grocery delivery marketplace Cornershop in 2019. Since that time, grocery delivery has seen an explosion in usage, thanks in large part to the pandemic, which makes it an attractive market for a logistics company like Uber. Last month, SEC filings showed that Uber was acquiring the remaining 47 percent of Cornershop.

Unlike the modern ride sharing-business, which Uber basically invented, the company will be facing a lot of competition for your grocery delivery dollar. DoorDash, which started out in restaurant delivery has made its own aggressive moves into grocery delivery and announced its own partnership with Albertsons last month. And of course Uber will be going up against Instacart, the 800-pound gorilla in third-party grocery delivery.

But perhaps the more interesting competition in major cities for Uber will come from the rapidly expanding speedy grocery delivery startups, which promise to get you your groceries in as few as 10 minutes. Services like JOKR and Fridge No More are expanding across New York City. Gorillas is hopping beyond New York and into San Francisco, where Food Rocket also operates.

These services all operate small, delivery-only grocery stores with a limited delivery radius. They are also vertically integrated, controlling their inventory and employing their own drivers. As Food Rocket CEO, Vitaly Alexandrov recently told me, having their own fleet of delivery people gives his company an advantage over services like Uber and Instacart. When an order is placed by the customer, the network doesn’t have to spend time finding a driver who will take the job. There is already a dedicated staffer on hand to make deliveries go out faster.

DoorDash operates its own line of DashMart delivery-only convenience stores, and Instacart is reportedly looking to build out its own automated fulfillment centers. With all this competition, will Uber, which has famously built its empire by emphatically not owning parts of its business like its driver network, need to cave and develop a more owned and operated stack?

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First we’ll have to see if Uber customers will even use Uber for grocery delivery on a massive scale.

Food Rocket Going Beyond Speedy Grocery Through Ghost Kitchens and an Open Platform

The sudden proliferation of speedy grocery delivery startups like San Francisco’s Food Rocket has been one of the bigger food tech stories of 2021. But for Vitaly Alexandrov, Co-Founder, and CEO of Food Rocket, fast grocery delivery is just a step to a much larger play.

“In a year or two years, it will be like a commodity,” Alexandrov said of fast grocery delivery during a video chat this week, “Everyone will deliver in ten minutes.”

And he’s probably right. Throughout this year we’ve seen a number of players pop up offering on-demand, ten-minute style grocery delivery through a network of small, dark stores with a limited delivery radius. Most of the activity has been in Europe so far with companies like Getir, Glovo and Gorillas all raising big money and expanding rapidly. But we are starting to see more startups show up here in the U.S., especially in New York City. Fridge No More, JOKR and Gorillas all operate in the Big Apple, and Gorillas recently announced its jumping across the country to open up stores in Food Rocket’s hometown of San Francisco.

But Alexandrov isn’t worried about Gorillas, or any of the other competitors that will undoubtedly come to his hometown, in fact he welcomes them. “When there are many competitors, the market grows faster,” he said. The idea of ten minute grocery delivery is very new, and customers need to learn a whole new way of treating grocery shopping more like a utility. Alexandrov said that more competitors in a market vying for customers means there are more companies educating customers about this new type of service. The result is a larger pool of knowledgeable customers and that rising tide should lift all (speedy) boats.

If that does play out, and that’s a big IF as we still need to see if these speedy grocery startups can scale, how will each service differentiate themselves? For Food Rocket there are two phases to its future growth. Alexandrov said in the near term, one of the ways Food Rocket will stand out is by offering its own line of ready to eat meals. To do this, the company will add ghost kitchens to its operational network. So in addition to staples like milk and eggs, you could also get your lunch or dinner delivered, and menus can be tailored to tastes of the specific neighborhood served.

The second phase of its future involves opening up its platform to other retailers. Over the next three years, Food Rocket will continue to build out its network and fine-tune its inventory management, fulfillment and delivery routing systems. At that point, Food Rocket could allow a more traditional retailer like Albertsons or Kroger to use its platform for fast delivery, and it’s easy to see why retailers could be interested.

If Food Rocket’s type of fast delivery catches on with consumers, two-hour or even half-hour delivery of groceries could be considered too slow. Instead of building out their own speedy delivery infrastructure, retailers could just use Food Rocket’s and launch immediately wherever Food Rocket is operating. It’s similar to the way retailers partnered with Instacart to establish delivery (and it could carry the same pitfalls). Though Alexandrov says it beats existing third party services because Food Rocket delivery people are employees — not contractors. So when an order comes in, the system doesn’t have to take the time to find a driver willing to fulfill the order (of course, having employees also drives Food Rocket’s costs up).

But that vision of Food Rocket’s future is still a ways off, and a lot needs to happen before that vision can pan out. More immediately for Food Rocket, Alexandrov told me that the company’s next move is expanding to cover roughly 95 percent of San Francisco by September and then it’s on to Los Angeles, where Food Rocket has already signed leases in West Hollywood and Santa Monica. Alexandrov said that in order for the business to work, stores need to be set up in locations where its limited delivery radius can cover 50,000 homes. That means Food Rocket won’t be coming to my rural neck of the woods anytime soon, but it, along with the other speedy delivery startups, may be taking off in a city near you soon.

Gorillas is Hiring Up to Expand its 10-Minute Grocery to San Francisco, LA and Chicago

As of now, New Yorkers have just about all the fun when it comes to super speedy grocery delivery in the U.S. Companies like Fridge No More, JOKR, Gorillas and, starting next month, Buyk are all building out a network of small, delivery-only grocery stores that promise to deliver your food in as few as ten minutes

But based on its current job listings, Gorillas is prepping to make a move out west. The company is currently hiring the following positions:

Germany-based Gorillas certainly has the cash to fuel such expansion. The company just raised $290 million in March, and has raised $335 million in total. There also currently isn’t that much competition in terms of speedy delivery grocery services on the West Coast. Food Rocket launched 15-minute grocery delivery in San Francisco at the end of May. Gopuff has a number of locations across California (and Chicago), though its delivery times are a comparatively “sluggish” 30 minutes.

Gorillas, like its rivals, operates dark stores in neighborhoods that have a limited delivery radius of typically one to one and a half miles. The economics of that certainly works in densely packed urban areas like New York, Chicago or even San Francisco, but Los Angeles is sprawling (though it does have a ton of people). I’m curious to see which neighborhoods Gorillas will start with and how it will expand.

As I’ve said before, I believe this new crop of speedy delivery services are not the next Kozmo.com’s. and they have the potential to turn grocery shopping into an on-demand utility. There is power in the idea of ordering a pint of ice cream and having it arrive at your doorstep 10 minutes later, and it could upend traditional notions of going to the grocery store in person (moreso than the pandemic did).

We’ll have to wait and see on that front, but in the meantime, one good thing about the Gorillas job openings is that they are all full-time with benefits, even the delivery driver position.

South Korea: Online Grocer Kurly Raises $200M Series F

Kurly, the South Korean startup behind online grocery service Market Kurly, announced today that it has raised a $200 million Series F round of funding. The Korea JoongAng Daily reports that this latest round was led by existing investors such as Aspex Management, DST Global, Sequoia Capital China, along with new investors like Millennium Management and CJ Logistics. This brings the total amount of money raised by Kurly to $428 million and gives the company a $2.2 billion valuation.

At the same time, Kurly also said that it would no longer seek to go public on U.S. stock exchanges and will instead IPO on a Korean stock exchange. For more on that, The Korea Economic Daily has some good background and context as to why Kurly may have made its stock market switch.

Here at The Spoon, we are more interested in the food tech angle, and Kurly is just the latest example of an online grocery startup raising big money. According to PitchBook data released last week, investors have poured more than $10 billion into grocery startups in 2021. Kurly’s $200M Series F is downright quaint compared to the $3 billion raised by Xingsheng Youxuan, or the $1.5 billion raised by Gopuff, or the $850 million raised by Getir.

Kurly’s business is also a little more traditional than many of the grocery startups raising money right now. Unlike Gopuff and Getir and the raft of smaller companies promising grocery delivery in just 10 minutes, Kurly offers its customers next-day delivery. What it lacks in speed however, it more than makes up for in size as it provides its service across South Korea.

The pandemic has driven a good deal of interest and investment in the online grocery sector. Fears of COVID-19 drove people into online grocery last year. And while online grocery sales have come down (at least in the U.S.) as vaccinations have rolled out, there is some market research showing this new e-grocery behavior will stick with consumers. Now we’ll have to see what post-pandemic reactions to online grocery are around the globe (and if it was worth all the investment).

Vegano Launches an All-Vegan E-Commerce Grocery Marketplace in Canada

Vancouver, Canada-based startup Vegano launched an online vegan marketplace today that will function as an e-commerce grocery-delivery storefront for plant-based food items.

For now, the service operates in the Metro Vancouver area as well as Squamish and Whistler. The company said it plans to expand to Toronto and Montreal by the end of this year in addition to heading Stateside and launching in Los Angeles. 

As its name suggests, Vegano sells 100 percent vegan foods sourced locally to each area the company serves. Up to now, this has been primarily through the Vegano’s meal kit service. Each week, users can pick three meal kits, which are delivered with pre-portioned ingredients and cooking instructions. Vegano says meals can be prepared in 30 to 45 minutes. 

The new online marketplace currently sells around 500 items from brands like No Whey Foods, Very Good Butchers, Field Roast, and others. The company said it plans to bump that number of products up to 10,000 by the end of 201. While shoppers don’t have to be existing Vegano meal kit subscribers to order from the marketplace, there is a $9.99 delivery fee for non-members. Members, meanwhile, can choose marketplace items and arrange to have them delivered on the same day as their meal kit.

Vegano says it has experienced a 150 percent growth in sales since January 2021. And little wonder, given the rise in sales of plant-based proteins around the world. Canada, specifically, got a major boost in this area last year when one of its own plant-based food producers, Merit Functional Foods, nabbed a $100 million investment from the government. Additionally, companies like Impossible and Eat Just have expanded their product lines to Canadian restaurants and retail shelves. The overall market for plant-based protein in Canada is expected to grow 14 percent annually by 2024.

Vegano closed a $4.2 oversubscribed round of Series A funding in March of this year. Funds are going towards scaling the company, and growing its marketplace and CPG offerings, in addition to accelerating product development. The company also plans to launch its own line of products to its marketplace by the end of this year.