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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Irish Grocery Startup Buymie Raises €5.8M, Expands Into UK

Buymie, a grocery delivery company based in Dublin, Ireland, announced today that it has raised €5.8 million (~$6.53 USD) in new funding. The round was led by Wheatsheaf Group, the food and agriculture investment arm of the Grosvenor Estate, with participation from existing backers Act Venture Capital, Sure Valley Ventures, Haatch Ventures, and HBAN.

This is the second funding announcement from Buymie in as many months. This new cash appears to be an add-on to the €2.2M (~$2.39M USD) Series A round the company started in April of this year. This brings the total amount of funding for Buymie to €10.6M (~$11.93M USD).

As we wrote back in April, Buymie is analogous to Instacart here in the U.S. Customers order through the app and Buymie shoppers go into stores like Lidl and Tesco to pick items out and make home deliveries.

Right now, demand for grocery delivery is skyrocketing because of the coronavirus pandemic. In April, Buymie told the Irish Times that it was experiencing 39 percent month-over-month growth and had seen a 300 percent increase in app downloads.

Back then, the company’s services were available to 490,000 households in the greater Dublin area. As part of today’s announcement emailed to The Spoon, Buymie said that it has just launched in the Bristol metropolitan area of the UK, the company’s first such expansion outside of Ireland. With its new funding, Buymie says that it will continue rapid growth to new markets both in Ireland and the UK.

Buymie’s fundraise comes just days after Instacart announced it had raised an addition $225 million to keep up with demand for grocery delivery here in the U.S. It appears that investors, at least, aren’t worried about demand dropping off too precipitously as lockdown restrictions start to ease.

Instacart Raises $225M Amid Surge in Grocery E-Commerce

Grocery delivery service Instacart announced today that it has raised a $225 million as part of a new funding round. DST Global and General Catalyst led the round with participation from existing investor D1 Capital Partners. This brings the total amount of funding raised by the company to $2.1 billion (with a b), and the company says it’s new funding brings its valuation to $13.7 billion.

Instacart’s new funding comes during a time of record-setting online grocery shopping spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent sheltering in place orders.

Instacart has had to make all sorts of sudden changes to its business on the fly as it tries to scale and keep up with demand for its delivery service. The company is bolstering the ranks of its gig shoppers to 750,000 and added new features like order ahead to try and ease congestion.

But it hasn’t all be smooth sailing. Instacart has been criticized over the treatment of its gig workers both during this pandemic and before. Instacart Shoppers have actually gone on strike multiple times to protest their working condition. As TechCrunch reports, the company has also spent $10 million to try and keep its Shoppers classified as contractors rather than as employees, which would cost the company more. TechCrunch also points out criticism Instacart has received over its public response to social injustice and the Black Lives Matter movement, which spoke in vague terms about supporting internal teams.

The larger, more existential question for Instacart right now is how much of this surge in online grocery shopping is permanent? The U.S. is just now starting to emerge from quarantine and there is some indication that people still prefer to shop for their groceries in person at the store. As a consequence, will Instacart be able to live up to its valuation hype once this pandemic recedes? There are now 225 million new reasons to find out.

Instacart Released a Feature to Battle Tip-Baiting

As if a braving stores during a global pandemic wasn’t enough for Instacart’s Shoppers (the gig workers who actually go into the grocery stores and make the deliveries), they’ve also had to deal with tip-baiting. Tip-baiting is when a customer entices a Shopper with the promise of a big tip, only to rescind that tip once the delivery is made. It’s a tactic some customers would use during especially busy times to get their delivery faster.

Disgusting, right?

On Friday, Instacart launched a new feature to help combat tip-baiting. TechCrunch writes that users who remove their tip after the delivery must provide feedback as to why it’s being changed. Users also now have only 24 hours to change a tip, down from the previous three-day window. (Ed. note: why did they allow a three day window in the first place?) Additionally, repeat tip removers will have their accounts deactivated.

Instacart said that tip-baiting wasn’t rampant and represented less than .5 percent of orders.

The move is the latest in a string of changes Instacart has had to make on the fly during this pandemic. The grocery delivery startup was thrust into the limelight over the past months, becoming an essential service as lockdowns and general fear of COVID-19 prevented people from going to the grocery store.

The record-setting, sudden influx of online grocery shoppers meant big changes for Instacart, including boosting the size of it network to 750,000 Shoppers, adding new grocery order features, and providing more health and safety measures for its Shoppers. There’s also been backlash from its Shoppers, many of which went on strike over the inadequacy of those health and safety measures, as well as the company’s default tipping policy.

As states start to re-open, questions remain about if and how people will return to the grocery store. The online grocery shopping boom will most likely come to an end this summer and from there will pivot to see how many e-commerce curious remain once the in-person option is once again available.

In the meantime, tip your Instacart, and every delivery driver, generously!

Kroger to Build Three Robot-Powered Fulfillment Centers in the Pac. Northwest, Great Lakes and West Regions

Kroger announced today that it will be building robot-powered fulfillment centers in the Pacific Northwest, Great Lakes and West regions of the U.S. This expansion marks the first such robot warehouses to be situated on the west coast.

These smart warehouses use technology from U.K. grocer Ocado to automate the process of online grocery order fulfillment. Kroger is taking a centralized approach to such fulfillment, building out 20 robot centers in various locations across the U.S. to serve as hubs for customer delivery.

Other retailers are taking a more localized approach to automated order logistics, choosing instead to build out micro fulfillment centers in the backs of existing neighborhood supermarkets. Albertsons and Ahold Delhaize both have partnerships with Takeoff Technologies to build these types of centers, while Walmart is using Alert Innovation for a similar experiment.

The speed of online grocery order fulfillment has definitely become more of a priority during this pandemic. Quarantining has driven record online grocery sales over the past few months, but retailers were ill equipped to handle the deluge of new orders. The result has been out of stock items and massive delays in delivery windows.

The question, however, is, will those online grocery shoppers remain after the pandemic recedes. Companies like Kroger and Albertsons are making big investments in automated fulfillment, but once we get back to “normal,” which definitely won’t be the old normal, will people want to go back into the grocery store to pick out their own food?

Kroger’s march towards automation predates the pandemic by a long shot, so current fluctuations driven by the coronavirus probably aren’t driving too much of its implementation. Besides, the first of Kroger’s robot warehouses isn’t even scheduled to open until early 2021, so there is time for grocers and shoppers to figure out any new preferences to grocery shopping.

Be Like Walmart and Swing for the Geofences

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Prior to the pandemic, I never grocery shopped at Walmart. It was too far away and I wanted to support my local supermarket. Throughout this pandemic, however, I’ve been at Walmart every week for my curbside grocery pickups. One reasons I’m such a frequent Walmarter now is that they make the whole process of getting groceries via curbside easy. I place my order, schedule my pickup time and when my groceries are ready, they send me a notification on my phone.

Part of that notification asks me to check-in with the Walmart app to let the store know I’m on my way. As I pull into their parking lot, the app automatically recognizes that I’ve arrived, thanks to the GPS on my phone and Walmart’s geofencing technology. Once I specify my parking stall, a Walmart staffer is out with my order and bada-boom, bada-bing, in minutes my trunk is loaded, no human contact has occurred and I’m on my way back home to shelter in place for another week.

Contrast Walmart with the curbside pickup experience at my local Safeway, which is a lot closer than the Walmart but does not have geofencing in its app. When I arrive at the store, I have to call a special number to let them know I’ve arrived, they ask me what stall I’m in and then send someone with my order out. Obviously my calling a number isn’t a huge deal, but it’s one extra step, and one more thing for a human staffer at Safeway to deal with all day while dealing with all the other changes this pandemic has brought with it.

Contactless is going to be the word of 2020, especially as it relates to food delivery and curbside pickup, and geofencing is going to play an increasingly important part of that. Yesterday, Panera announced geofence-enabled curbside pickup for orders, and IBM has been touting Safe Queue, a virtual line app powered in part by geofencing that was created for Big Blue’s Call for Code Global Challenge contest.

As a technology, geofencing has actually been around for long time. But it will take on more importance as restaurants and grocers look to efficiently maximize their revenues while reducing human-to-human contact. Restaurants that must operate at reduced dine-in capacity need a robust off-premises plan, including curbside pickup, and people are still scared of going into the grocery store itself, requiring pickup options as well.

Geofencing means orders can be fulfilled more quickly because the restaurant or supermarket knows when you’ve arrived. Walmart may have huge parking lots and plenty of space for cars pickup up orders, but a lot of restaurants and independent grocers don’t. They’ll need to make the most of their physical takeout/pickup space. The faster a curbside order is handed off, the faster cars turn over in the parking lot and the more orders can be fulfilled.

There is obviously a privacy tradeoff with geofencing. Some people may not want to hand over their location data to Walmart, Panera or whomever, and that’s okay. Different strokes and all. Privacy is a constant question we come up against in this connected world, and we should definitely hold businesses accountable to being good stewards of our data.

There are lots of changes consumer facing food businesses will need to make (and re-make) in order to survive this pandemic. But if curbside pickups are part of your plan, you should fire up the geofencing now.

Woot! Founder Launches Pasta by Mail

It kinda makes sense that Matt Rutledge, the founder of Woot!, an e-commerce site known for its sense of humor, would choose noodles for a food-related project. I mean, noodles are funny, especially the way Rutledge is selling them.

Rutledge launched PastaDrop, a “pasta as a service” online pop-up that lets you buy random amounts of pasta and have it sent to friends. PastaDrop determines the quantity of noodles being shipped and hilarity ensues (again, because noodles = funny).

Spoon founder Mike Wolf reached out to Rutledge for an email interview to find out more about PastaDrop. You should read the whole exchange (it’s very entertaining), but here’s an amuse-bouche to get you started:

Wolf: Why pasta?

This is our first Pasta experience! What a product! There is a subset of variety with personal opinion. There are amazing recipes to share. It’s a comfort food. It has a long shelf life and can be transported without much risk of damage. It is quite dense and therefore efficient to ship; hundreds of servings can fit in a box. Best of all it can be funny in mass quantities! Oh, and there are pasta puns — we love puns!

Sign Up for Spoon Plus, Our New Membership Insights & Virtual Events Community

Last week we announced the launch of Spoon Plus, our new membership community that gives you exclusive deep dives on food tech trends, original market research, and virtual events with the smartest people in the industry.

You can read Mike’s post about the launch of Plus here to learn about why we’re so excited about it.

There’s a plan for every budget, and if you buy an annual subscription, you get a ticket to Smart Kitchen Summit Virtual 2020, the industry-leading global food tech summit.

Spoon Plus is our chance and yours to connect on a deeper level and engage with the issues in a more meaningful way. We are offering a one-time charter member discount of 40% for those that join by the end of this week. Join today and use coupon code LAUNCH at check out.

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Cashierless Tech Consolidation: Standard Cognition Buys Checkout Technologies

Standard Cognition, a San Francisco-based cashierless checkout startup, has acquired aptly named Italian company Checkout Technologies, which also does autonomous retail. TechCrunch was first to report the news. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Standard Cognition has raised $86 million in funding, while Checkout had raised just €1.3M ($1.42 USD). Standard Cognition CEO Jordan Fisher told TechCrunch that the two companies had been talking since the middle of last year and were in the final diligence stage of the deal when the COVID-19 pandemic struck Italy particularly hard.

The global COVID-19 crisis could actually help spur adoption of cashierless checkout at retail. The technology allows shoppers to walk into a store, grab what they want and get charged automatically upon exit. This type of contactless transaction reduces the number of human-to-human interactions happening in a store, which could help protect store workers and put shoppers more at ease with in-store shopping.

Fisher also told TechCrunch that he expects to see consolidation in the autonomous checkout space. There is certainly a bevy of startups bringing their cashierless solutions to market. In addition to Standard Cognition and Checkout Technologies, there is Trigo, Grabango, Zippin, Caper, Shopic, Swiftly, Skip, AiFi, and Accel Robotics. Not to mention Amazon, which is the grandaddy of cashierless checkout and will be licensing out its technology. And while Walmart’s IRL store hasn’t implemented cashierless checkout yet, it has banks of cameras monitoring in-store inventory, and it’s not too huge a leap to think they will roll out cashierless options soon.

We started to see some grocery retailers go public with their cashierless partnerships last year. Trigo is at Tesco and Shufersal, Grabango with Giant Eagle, and Zippin with Lojas Americanas. But the big impediment to implementing these cashierless technologies, at least at large grocery chains, is that they need to work at scale and right away. There’s still a learning curve and workflow adoption of cashierless checkout that needs to happen for most consumers.

But the coronavirus pandemic is accelerating the adoption of certain technologies around food, especially if they help promote the safety of workers and shoppers alike. Cashierless checkout could be here in a meaningful way sooner than we expected.

Ahold Delhaize Launches Cleaning Bot Challenge to Find a Robot Floor Scrubber

Ahold Delhaize is on the lookout for a floor scrubbing robot, and it wants your help. Well, it wants your help if you’re a small startup that already has an existing prototype or MVP of a floor cleaning robot.

The Dutch grocery giant’s AI for Retail (AIRLab) unit kicked off the Cleaning Bot Challenge today in an effort to automate the process of cleaning store floors. Ahold Delhaize described the problem in a post kicking off the challenge:

In supermarkets, floors are cleaned once a day before each store opens. It takes cleaning personnel an average of two hours every morning to sweep the floors for dirt, mop the hard-to-reach corners, and then go through the store with a ride-on floor scrubber. It is certainly both a time-consuming and labor-intensive activity. 

Ahold Delhaize’s AI for Retail (AIR) Lab is, thus, looking for a partner that can automate this process by creating an autonomous cleaning robot.

To be considered for the Cleaning Bot Challenge, participants must have a team of at least two co-founders and have an existing prototype of the robot. That robotic solution must be able to scale and the founders must be able to pitch their product in Dutch or English.

It’s not surprising that Ahold Delhaize is looking to automate cleaning its floors. Repetitive, manual tasks like floor scrubbing are perfect for robots. And in the age of COVID-19, cleaning is more important than ever, so you want to ensure the process is consistent and repeatable (two more robot attributes).

It’s also not surprising because Ahold Delhaize has basically gone all-in on robots. Last year the company’s GIANT/MARTIN’s and Stop & Shop stores ordered 500 aisle roaming robots to scan for messes on the floor. Ahold Delhaize has also partnered with Takeoff to build robotic micro-fulfillment centers at some of its retail locations. And Stop & Shop even installed a Breadbot at one of its locations.

What is a little surprising, is that given all of these robo-connections and experience, the company is holding a public contest to find a floor cleaning robot, especially since there are already floor scrubbing robots on the market. A year ago, Walmart announced it was deploying Brain Corp.’s autonomous floor scrubbing robots to 1,500 of its locations.

Were none of these solutions sufficient? What was lacking from existing robot partners that spurred a global hunt for something better? We reached out to Ahold Delhaize to find out more.

In the meantime, if you have a cleaning bot up your sleeve, you have until July 7 to complete your application.

Would You Prefer to Stand in a Virtual Line When Going to the Grocery Store?

One of the ways grocery stores have dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic is to limit the number of shoppers that can physically go into the store at a given time. As a result, people are standing in a very long lines outside some supermarkets as they are spaced a socially distant six feet apart from each other.

Even with social distancing, you’re still surrounded by other people who may or may not be wearing a facemask, depending on where you live it could be hot (or cold), and everyone else in line is probably just as on-edge about the whole situation as you are. But what if you could just stay in the comfort of your own car while you wait your turn? That’s the idea behind Safe Queue, an app borne out of the IBM Call for Code Global Challenge.

Created by Los Angeles-based developer David Chura, Safe Queue is a mobile app that creates virtual lines to gain entrance into stores. Once downloaded, a user puts in the address of the store they want to go to when they are within 1,000 feet of the store, the app places them in a virtual line. A unique QR code is sent to the user along with updates about their place in line. When its (finally) their turn to go in, they present the code to store personnel who scan it for authenticity.

Having this virtual queue could be useful for people with disablities that make it difficult for them to stand for long periods of time, or for people with small children. Or for anyone who just wants grocery shopping to be a little less stressful.

At the same time, Safe Queue, and so many other things about this pandemic, highlights issues around equity and inequality. People with smart phones can wait in their cars, people without are stuck standing in line. And also, how would it work if you have a mix of people just standing in line without the app and people who do have the app. How is the place in line determined then?

Hopefully, these are issues that Chura is working on. There are plans to release Safe Queues as an open source project as well as through the Apple and Google app stores. An IBM spokesperson told me that if enough people downloaded the app, it could be used to create a grass roots-style call for businesses and governments to adopt the virtual line technology. But that seems like a bit of a stretch to me. I’m not sure how many people would download an app that wouldn’t work until enough people adopted it. It seems like something stores would have to embed into their native apps and offer to people (after working through the equity issues).

Having said that, I applaud Chura for his creative thinking in trying to solve a problem people face in this pandemic. Now we’ll just have to see if stores and consumers line up to try Safe Queue out.

Shopic Raises $7.6 Million Series A for its Cashierless Checkout Tech

Shopic, and Israel-based startup that creates cashierless checkout solutions for medium to large grocery stores, announced today that it has raised a $7.6 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by IBI Tech Fund, with participation from existing investor Entrée Capital, and brings the company’s total funding so far to $11 million.

Cashierless checkout systems use computer vision, shelf sensors and artificial intelligence to allow shoppers to walk in to a store, grab what they want and leave, getting charged automatically as they exit.

We weren’t familiar with Shopic before the company emailed us their announcement this morning. Based on Shopic’s website, it appears that unlike other cashierless checkout startups, Shopic’s system does not rely on retrofitting a store with banks of computer vision cameras to monitor what shoppers purchase. Instead, it looks like Shopic uses a shopper’s mobile phone, which they use to scan items as they shop, and there is a component that monitors the shopping cart itself to ensure that there is no shoplifting.

Shopic also allows stores to communicate back to the customer as they shop. So, based on what someone is buying, the store could offer enhanced product information or push customized sales and promotions in real time. Shopic also says its system can also help stores optimize shelf stocking and in-store behavior.

With its fresh round of capital, Shopic says that it will expand deployments of is platform to existing and new customers across Europe and North America, though it will be facing plenty of competition.

Amazon is big pioneer of cashierless checkout with its Go and Go Grocery stores. A host of startups also offer solutions to supermarkets around the world. Trigo, Grabango and Zippin all use Amazon-like systems of cameras and computer vision to keep track of what people are buying. But Shopic seems to be more of a blend between the mobile phone aspect of Swiftly and the cart monitoring of Caper.

Shopic’s fundraise has also come at a unique time. The COVID-19 global pandemic is re-shaping the grocery store experience as retailers attempt to reduce human-to-human contact. As such, preventative measures like facemasks are being worn by store employees and plexiglass shields are going up in front of cashiers.

But at some point, for the people who aren’t too scared to go into the grocery stores themselves, a contactless cashierless checkout might be the best option. You don’t have to interact with a cashier or touch a credit card terminal that potentially hundreds of other people have touched that day.

For sure, there are still questions around equity and jobs that go along with widescale adoption of cashierless checkout. But as the virus continues its rampage and even resurges in some areas, grocery retailers could accelerate more contactless options like cashierless checkout to keep shoppers and workers safe.

An earlier version of this story said Shopic had raised a total of $8.45 million, based on data in Crunchbase. Shopic got in touch with us and provided the accurate dollar figure.

Walmart Launches Two-Hour Express Delivery as Grocery E-Commerce Surges

Walmart announced Express Delivery, the company’s zippy new two-hour delivery service for food and other goods, yesterday. The new service comes in the middle of a global pandemic that has spurred a drastic wave of demand online grocery shopping.

According to the press announcement, Express Delivery was being tested in 100 stores since Mid-April. In early May, the service will broaden to nearly 1,000 stores before rolling out to 2,000 total stores in the ensuing weeks. Express Delivery costs an additional $10 on top of the initial delivery fee.

The obvious motivation for Express Delivery is simply that more people than ever are shopping for groceries online. In fact, a survey out this week from Brick Meets Click found that online grocery sales hit $5.3 billion in April, up 37 percent over March (which was its own record-setting month). Order number, size and frequency are all up as well.

In March, a market research study from Gordon Haskett Research Advisors found that Walmart was the top destination for those shopping for groceries online. So the company has been bearing the brunt of this crush of online shoppers.

Walmart, as well as every other grocery retailer, has been struggling to keep up e-commerce demand. It was looking to bring on an additional 150,000 workers this Spring to keep up. In addition to delivery and now Express Delivery, the retailer also expanded its contactless curbside pickup options.

Back before the dark times, Walmart was in the midst of working on Walmart+, its answer to Amazon Prime. Walmart+ reportedly would expand on Walmart’s Delivery Unlimited subscription service as well as offer perks on things like prescriptions and gas.

Speaking of Amazon, Walmart’s Express Delivery also brings it up to speed, as it were, with the two-hour delivery Amazon offers for free to its Prime members. Once this pandemic recedes, it’s not too hard to imagine Walmart’s Express Delivery, having been scaled and battle-tested by COVID-19-driven demand, would be a benefit of Walmart+.

For those interested in trying out Express Delivery, visit walmart.com/grocery or the Walmart app and search for your ZIP code to see if Express Delivery is offered in your area.

Online Grocery Sales Hit $5.3 Billion in April, Up 37 Percent from March

April was a record-setting month for U.S. online grocery sales, which reached $5.3 billion, according to new research released by Brick Meets Click and Symphony RetailAI earlier this week (tip of the hat to Grocery Dive). This represents a 37 percent growth over March, which was its own record month with $4.0 billion in sales.

The Brick Meet Click survey found that over the last 30 days, 40 million people shopped for groceries online (up from 39.5 million in March), with the total number of orders hitting 62.5 million in April (up from 46.9 million in March), and a slight increase in spending per order at $85 in April (up from $82 in March). Consider, for comparison, that a Gallup survey in August of last year showed that only 11 percent of respondents shopped for groceries online once a month.

All of this record-setting action, of course, is driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and shelter-in-place orders enacted across the country starting in March. This isolation and social distancing spurred droves of people online to shop for groceries to be either picked up curbside or delivered.

Among the motivating factors for grocery e-commerce was fear. Brick Meets Click found that 47 percent of households surveyed had a “high level” of concerns about catching the novel coronavirus. This echoes a recent survey from C+R Research that found 60 percent of respondents were “fearful” of actually shopping at the grocery store.

These record months of online grocery shopping have put a tremendous strain on the grocer retail infrastructure. Amazon, Walmart, Kroger Instacart and others have all ramped up hiring and added additional measures to try and keep up with the sudden uptick in demand.

But despite two record months in a row, there are bigger, more existential troubling signs on the horizon. In addition to all the boomtown data Brick Meets Click found, its survey also gave us a sobering glimpse at the economic hardship data that lags behind the big sales numbers: 39 percent of surveyed households indicated that their monthly income has dropped 25 percent or more since January and February of this year. Less household money, sadly, means less spent at the grocery store.

Though grocery stores have remained opened during this pandemic, some states are starting to ease their shelter-in-place restrictions. We look forward to seeing Brick Meets Click’s May scorecard to see if and how online grocery shopping behavior has changed.

Ireland Grocery Delivery Startup Buymie Raises €2.2M

Buymie, a grocery delivery startup based in Dublin, Ireland, announced this week that it has raised €2.2 million (~$2.39M USD) and extended its partnership with German supermarket chain Lidl for another two years. The Irish Times first reported the news on Tuesday. ACT Venture Capital led the round, with participation from Sure Valley Ventures and Eamonn Quinn Buymie’s chairman. This brings the total amount raised by Buymie to €4.8 million (~$5.21M USD).

Like Instacart here in the U.S., Buymie’s workers go into Tesco and Lidl stores to shop for items then deliver them to customers’ homes in as little as an hour. Buymie is available to more than 490,000 households in the greater Dublin area, and the company will use its new funds to build out its service and expand into a second city.

Demand for grocery delivery in Ireland has skyrocketed during the coronavirus pandemic. Buymie told the Irish Times that the number of monthly active customers is growing up 39 percent month over month, and that there’s been a 300 percent increase in the number of downloads for its app.

However, all this rapid growth has a downside as customers are now facing weeklong delays before delivery windows open up. Hence the need for Buymie’s fresh capital raise to scale accordingly.

The need to scale quickly is a situation U.S. grocers are all too familiar with. Shelter in place orders have resulted in a surge in online grocery shopping, forcing even the biggest grocery companies to scramble in an effort to keep up. Amazon has put new Fresh and Whole Foods customers on a waitlist before they can get deliveries. ShopRite has put customers in a virtual waiting room before they can even shop. And delivery service Instacart is swelling its ranks of Shopper gig workers to 750,000 to keep up with demand.

Here in the U.S., some states are starting to relax shelter in place orders, which raises the question of whether or not the desire for online grocery shopping will remain. A recent survey showed that 60 percent of American shoppers are “fearful” of actually going into the grocery store. So while grocery e-commerce may not be full throttle, it probably won’t disappear completely once people are allowed to leave their homes.

I’m not sure what the situation is like in Ireland, but everyone eats, and it looks like Buymie’s funding is coming at the right time.