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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Walgreens

Walgreens Launches Two-Hour Delivery

Drug store giant Walgreens is getting in on the speedy delivery game, as the company announced today that it now offers nationwide two-hour delivery of more than 24,000 products.

According to a press announcement, customers can shop via Walgreens’ website or app as the normally would. There is no minimum order required and upon checkout, shoppers select Same Day Delivery and can receive their items in under two hours.

Walgreens has existing delivery relationships with third-party services like Postmates, DoorDash and Instacart. But in those cases, customers ordered via the third-party platforms, not Walgreens. Though this new service has customers using the Walgreens site and app, a Walgreens rep told us that the actual delivery of items is still being facilitated third-party delivery companies like Uber and DoorDash. This new arrangement, however, would allow Walgreens to keep more of its customer data, rather than hand it off entirely to a delivery company.

That Walgreens is launching its own fast, two-hour delivery option isn’t that much of a surprise. The lines between grocery retailer, drug store and convenience store continue to blur as shoppers can buy a variety of foods, medicines, beverages and beauty items at any of those options. As such, Walgreens is being squeezed by grocery giants like Amazon and its two-hour delivery on one end, and upstarts like the delivery-only convenience store goPuff, which offers delivery of items in as little as a half hour, 24 hours a day.

Another benefit of Walgreens ramping up its delivery efforts is that hopefully fewer sick people will go into stores. Walgreens delivery is contactless, which means people with colds and flus won’t have to wander store aisles, stand in line with other healthy customers or interact with human cashiers. A definite benefit in this pandemic age.

Instacart and Walgreens Launching Same Day Delivery Nationwide

Drug store chain Walgreens announced today that it is partnering with Instacart to roll out same-day delivery service across the U.S.

According to the announcement, tens of thousands of Walgreen’s items are now available for delivery via Instacart across Illinois, with the program set to expand nationwide to roughly 8,000 stores over the coming weeks. Instacart will deliver groceries, over-the-counter medications, health and wellness products, household essentials, convenience products and more in as little as one hour.

After the partnership launch in Illinois, Instacart delivery will expand to markets such as Southeast Florida, Dallas, Atlanta, Washington D.C., New York City and more. The delivery partnership will be across all 50 states throughout the spring.

This isn’t the first delivery partnership for Walgreens. Last year the drug store company partnered with DoorDash for delivery in select U.S. cities and expanded its partnership with Postmates nationwide. Both of those announcements came during or shortly after the first major wave of the COVID-19 pandemic here in the U.S. Around that time, with people in various states of lockdown and social distance across the country, grocery e-commerce skyrocketed.

Buying food online has remained sticky with consumers in the U.S. throughout the different waves of the pandemic. The most recent market survey from Brick Meets Click showed that in January 2021, 70 million U.S. households placed an average of 2.8 grocery orders online for pickup, delivery and ship-to-home orders.

Consumers have now spent just about a year under the thumb of the pandemic and new habits have definitely formed around how we get our food and other goods. Delivery is no longer a nice to have, it’s table stakes for any household good-related retailer.

DoorDash Partners with Walgreens for Delivery in Select Cities

DoorDash announced today that delivery is now available from Walgreens drug stores in Chicago, Atlanta, and Denver, and will broaden that reach to other markets later this summer. This move marks the latest expansion beyond restaurants for the third-party delivery service.

According to a DoorDash blog post announcing the partnership:

Customers in select cities will have access to more than 2,000 convenience, health, and wellness essentials including beauty products, over-the-counter medications, and grocery and snack foods.

So if you’re hungry for a Snickers and a six-pack of soda but don’t want to leave the house — you’re in luck.

The addition of Walgreens to DoorDash’s roster isn’t too surprising given that the company has already partnered with other non-restaurant stores such as 7-Eleven, WaWa, Casey’s, and CVS Pharmacy.

This type of diversification beyond restaurants is necessary as the global COVID-19 pandemic continues to devastate the restaurant industry. As my colleague, Jenn Marson recently wrote:

As of June 15, roughly 140,000 businesses were listed on Yelp as closed. While retail got hit the hardest, restaurants came in at a close second, with 23,981 businesses closed. And here’s the kicker: more than half — 53 percent — of those restaurants currently closed won’t reopen, according to Yelp.

This isn’t the first delivery partner for Walgreens either. The drug store chain has an existing partnership with Postmates, which recently expanded to 7,000 stores nationwide. For retailers like Walgreens, delivery options allow them to keep selling stuff to people who are stuck at home during these rolling lockdowns.

DoorDash said that the Walgreens deal will reach Cincinnati, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Sacramento and Seattle later this summer.

Walgreens and Postmates Expanding Delivery to 7,000 Stores

In response to a nation increasingly sheltering in place and socially distant, Walgreens announced this week that it is expanding its delivery program with Postmates to 7,000 stores nationwide.

To access delivery from Walgreens, customers just need to download the Postmates app. From there, they can shop for health and wellness items, including over-the-counter medications, and have them delivered via no-contact to their homes.

Today’s news is the latest in a string of announcements illustrating how traditional food delivery companies are broadening their services to meet the demands of both businesses and consumers.

Yesterday, Uber Eats announced a number of delivery partnerships with convenience stores in France, Spain and Brazil. Also yesterday, DoorDash announced a new Convenience category to deliver food and more from conveniences stores like 7-Eleven, Wawa and Circle K.

These expansions should ideally be a win/win/win scenario. Third party delivery companies can expand their market share into new verticals, a necessity given how many restaurants, their primary business right now, are shutting down. Businesses can help make up lost revenue from depressed in-store traffic resulting from social distancing by offering delivery. And consumers that still need items can get them while remaining socially distant.

The Walgreens expansion also reinforces how important delivery people are in this time of outbreak. They are risking their own health to bring us food and other essentials. Postmates currently classifies its workers as contractors, which makes them ineligible for things like health insurance and sick leave.

That may be changing though. Earlier this week, my colleague Jenn Marston reported that a New York federal judge ruled that “Postmates couriers are employees and therefore eligible for unemployment benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The one constant in this coronvirus world is change. We are watching in real-time as the food world is upended. Now we just have to see how many of these changes, like nationwide delivery from drug stores, will last once the pandemic subsides.

More Walgreens to Get Kroger Grocery Sections

Kroger and Walgreens announced today that they will expand their joint retail pilot program into Knoxville, TN. The program, which sees select Walgreens drug stores selling Kroger groceries, started in October of last year in northern Kentucky.

The program will begin this fall in 35 Walgreens stores in Knoxville, and according to the press release:

The assortment will vary by store and can include fresh meat, produce and dairy, frozen foods, shelf-stable products and Home Chef meal solutions to provide customers with a fill-in grocery shopping experience. Most locations will feature a full Kroger Express assortment, with up to 2,700 products, and other stores, on average, will offer 2,300 products.

Additionally, the press release said that most locations will accommodate Kroger Pickup, which means orders placed online can be picked up curbside by customers.

It’s also worth noting that Home Chef was name-checked in today’s announcement. The Kroger-owned Home Chef meal kits were introduced at Walgreens in December last year. At that time, the two companies announced they would roll out Home Chef meal kits to the stores in the Kentucky pilot, as well as 65 Walgreens in the Chicago area.

The evolution of meal kits is something we’ve been following at The Spoon, as they have migrated from mail order to retail, including non-traditional food outlets like drug stores. The fact that Kroger mentioned Home Chef specifically seems to indicate that sales of meal kits at Walgreens are robust enough to keep expanding their availability.

Between retail experiments like this one with Walgreens, building out robot warehouses and testing self-driving vehicles, Kroger’s willingness to try just about anything to get you groceries is the main reason we added them to our Food Tech 25: Twenty Five Companies Creating the Future of Food in 2019 list this year.

The Loop Launches Reusable Packaging Program in the U.S., Adds Kroger and Walgreens as Partners

We were excited when The Loop announced its re-useable packaging program in January of this year, as a number of big name CPG companies like Pepsi, Nestlé and Unilever had hopped on board. Today, The Loop announced that its waste reducing program has now launched here in the U.S., and added Kroger and Walgreens to its roster of partners.

As a refresher, The Loop (an initiative of waste management company Terracycle) sells name-brand CPG products in a way that harkens back to the milkman of yore. Products like ice cream, pancake mix and orange juice are sold in re-useable containers made from materials like metal or glass. These products ship directly to consumers who, after using them, put the empty containers back into the tote they arrived in, and The Loop picks everything back up to be sterilized, re-filled and re-sold.

While our plastic waste problem is huge in this country right now, sadly, The Loop’s availability is not. It’s initial pilot programs will only be available in the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S., specifically New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Washington, D.C.

If you are lucky enough to live in one of the select areas, you can visit loopstore.com, thekrogerco.com/loop or walgreens.com/loop to place an order. Though the press release didn’t mention it, CNN reports that customers will be able to pick up their Loop orders and drop off the empties at Kroger and Walgreens. And while all purchases happen exclusively online right now, Loop’s press release did say that down the road, there may be an option to purchase Loop products in stores at select Kroger and Walgreens markets.

The Loop is launching at the right time as companies across the food industry are looking at ways to reduce their plastic use. Earlier this week, Whole Foods announced it was getting rid of plastic straws, reducing the size of its plastic produce bags, and is no longer using hard plastic containers for its rotisserie chickens. And on a much broader scale, the EU voted to ban single-use plastics by 2021.

Today’s move by Kroger also reaffirms why we put them on The Spoon’s Food Tech 25: Companies Creating the Future of Food list this week. While we don’t know how U.S. consumers will react to The Loop’s re-packaging program, at least Kroger (and The Loop and Walgreens) is recognizing the issue of plastic waste and experimenting with a way to help reduce it.

Chef’d Returns From the Dead to Invade Retail Stores Across the U.S.

Shuttered meal kit company Chef’d is back from the dead, this time as a clean-label retail kit courtesy of True Food Innovations. The latter just announced it will roll out meal kits under the Chef’d and True Chef monikers in retail outlets in 2019.

True Food purchased the assets to Chef’d in July 2018, shortly after Chef’d unexpectedly closed its doors, citing funding and expense issues. The company was one of the first to sell meal kits in stores, via a Costco partnership, in addition to its mail-subscription service.

Under True Food, Chef’d kits will return to stores, this time with a 55-day shelf life thanks to a patent-pending formula True Food has developed that uses high-pressure processing without the need for preservatives. All kits require 15 to 20 minutes of prep time. Most interesting, True Food claims its kits’ 55-day shelf life has “cracked the code” on meal kits and that it’s a “key differentiator and absolute requirement for retail meal kits to be commercially viable for nationwide distribution.”

No word yet on which stores will carry the resurrected Chef’d meal kits, but True Food has said the rollout will be nationwide. We’ve reached out to True Food for more launch and pricing details and will update them here as they roll in. What we do know is that Chef’d historically worked with non-traditional retailers, forging partnerships with drug stores, wholesalers, and even one with Byte, to supply office fridges with meal kits. One wonders if True Food will continue that approach with the newly resurrected Chef’d.

Whichever stores Chef’d lands in, it will go up against numerous other meal kits that have turned to the retail sector over the last year or so. Kroger, who bought Home Chef, announced in December 2018 it was rolling out a pilot with Walgreens to sell meal kits in the drug store. Walgreens previously had a deal with Chef’d before the latter shut down. Albertsons bought Plated last year and started offering its meal kits nationwide in stores.

No one’s been so bold as to claim they’ve cracked the code, which is a way of saying you have the ultimate solution the industry has been frantically digging to find the last few years. “We listened to our retail partners and we developed products to solve their problem: shelf life,” Alan True, CEO and founder of True, said in a release.

The numbers will tell us soon enough if a longer shelf-life is indeed they key to selling more meal kits. But if that’s the case, I can’t help thinking it might be cheaper and easier to just grab a frozen dinner and call it a day.

Kroger Expands Home Chef Meal Kit Sales in Walgreens Drug Stores

Kroger and Walgreens announced today that the two companies are building on a pilot program launched in October that has Kroger selling both grocery items and its Home Chef meal kits in Walgreens drug stores.

Walgreens will carve out floor space for a new “Kroger Express” section in select stores that will sell 2,300 curated items including meat, dairy, produce, CPG products as well as Home Chef meal kits. Kroger purchased Home Chef earlier this year for $200 million. The first such Kroger Express is already up and running in Florence, Kentucky (near Kroger’s Cincinnati headquarters) with twelve more pilot stores also across Northern Kentucky opening early next year.

At the same time, Kroger said that today it launched sales of Home Chef Express meal kits across 65 Walgreens in the Chicago area. The Home Chef Express meal kits serve two, promise to take only 15 minutes to prepare, will feature a rotating menu and will cost roughly ~$17.00.

For Spoon readers, what’s noteworthy about this news is the continuation of a trend that has meal kits moving to new and non-traditional retail outlets. Chef’d was a pioneer in this and had actually partnered with Walgreen’s as a meal kit sales channel in June of this year… before it abruptly shut down. According to The Wall Street Journal, Albertsons was going to sell Plated meal kits in Rite-Aid stores as part of their planned merger, but that merger fell through.

Kroger’s agreement with Walgreens is still just a pilot, so we’ll see if consumers want to grab a Hickory Seasoned Salmon and when they stock up on exfoliating cream. But it reinforces how Kroger continues to be nimble in its bid to fight off Amazon from swallowing up the grocery industry. In addition to this deal, the grocery giant is also experimenting with self-driving delivery vehicles, established an innovation lab, and is building out robot-driven warehouse fulfillment centers.

Chef’d Puts Meal Kits in Walgreens and Duane Reade Drugstores

Shoppers can pick up prescriptions and a pre-packed dinner at the drugstore, as meal kit company Chef’d has started selling its meal kits at Walgreens and Duane Reade.

Supermarket News reports that Chef’d and Smithfield Foods have teamed up on a pilot program to offer three different meal kits in 30 Walgreens and Duane Reade stores across New York City and parts of New Jersey. The Chef’d meal kits will retail for $15.99 and serve two or more people.

Grabbing dinner just down the aisle from where you buy Dramamine may seem a bit incongruous at first. But drugstores have long since evolved beyond just aisles of medicine cabinet items and helpful pharmacists in white lab coats to carrying items for just about every room of the house.

It’s even less surprising that Chef’d is the meal kit company expanding into drugstores, as the company has been a vanguard in its sales channels strategy. Unlike its competitors, Chef’d works with a wide range of white label partners including Campbell’s, Good Housekeeping, and Coca Cola.

Chef’d was also an early adopter of a brick-and-mortar retail strategy, selling its meal kits through Costco, and then expanding into more than a dozen retailers last month through a partnership with Smithfield. Just about every other meal kit company since the start of this year has jumped on the retail bandwagon.

But in addition to supermarket shelves, Chef’d, which we named as one of our Top 25 Food Tech Companies Changing the Way We Eat, continues to innovate in other ways. Last month, it partnered with Byte Foods to make meal kits available in office fridges, and Chef’d recently teamed up with Innit in a move that inches us closer to customizeable shoppable recipes.

Diversification into drugstores and other non-traditional sales platforms may actually be necessary for Chef’d, as grocery giants have been gobbling up meal kit companies left and right. Albertsons now owns Plated and Kroger bought Home Chef, not to mention the fact that Amazon/Whole Foods and Walmart are making their own meal kits — which means that Chef’d could be boxed out of those store aisles altogether.

That pressure from the big retailers seems to be pushing Chef’d into different corners of the retail world. I wouldn’t be surprised to see meal kits pop up in convenience stores, gyms or other places you could grab dinner on your way home.