Inside the many grocery delivery
A Fridge No More delivery worker goes on a run in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Photos by Gabriele Holtermann
BY KIRSTYN BRENDLEN
This is the first story in
Schneps Media’s five-part series
examining the proliferation
of grocery delivery services
across the city — and the impact
they’re having on residents
and brick-and-mortar business
owners alike.
In a city where the sight of
delivery workers whizzing by
on an electric bicycle with an
insulated bag strapped to their
back has become ubiquitous, a
handful of new grocery delivery
apps have emerged — all
marketing the speed at which
they can have a forgotten
dinner ingredient, pint of ice
cream, or roll of toilet paper at
your door.
Startups including JOKR,
Gorillas, and Fridge No More
are slowly marking their territory
in New York City, setting
up shop in a select handful of
neighborhoods and luring in
customers with the promise
of getting their order within
ten minutes, whether it’s two
items or 20.
They join a legion of other
delivery apps that have
changed the dining game in
New York City, like Uber Eats
and DoorDash, who deliver
hot meals from restaurants
right to your door, and Insta-
Cart which outsources your
grocery list to a contracted
worker who will do the shopping
for you and deliver it to
your home. Fresh Direct, the
city’s oldest online delivery
service, delivers all their food
from their mega-warehouse in
the south Bronx.
Apps like JOKR and Gorillas
mirror Fresh Direct’s approach.
Their orders are filled
in their own warehouses, not
at independent grocery stores
or restaurants — but that’s
where the similarities end.
Rather than concentrating
their stock in one huge warehouse,
they make use of “dark
stores,” micro-warehouses
scattered across the city. Each
micro-warehouse delivers to
the neighborhood it’s in, not
citywide.
Each of JOKR’s dark stores
TIMESLEDGER | Q 16 NS.COM |OCT. 22 - OCT. 28, 2021
serves about one square mile,
said Tyler Trerotola, a US cofounder
of the app. The company
uses a software that calculates
how far an eight-minute
ride on an electric bicycle
is, then draws a “polygon”
around the warehouse to show
the coverage area.
“We try to place those a
mile apart from each other,”
Trerotola said. “Once in a
while, we will overlap them.
We try not to, but say there’s
an area with really high demand,
and we want to make
sure we’re meeting that demand,
there’s potential to
have somewhat of an overlap
on these polygons.”
JOKR launched in New
York City in June with four
hubs, and have since expanded
to ten, delivering to Williamsburg,
Long Island City, lower
Manhattan, the Upper East
Side and the Upper West Side.
The company expects to open
an additional ten hubs before
the end of the year.
Started last spring by German
entrepreneur Ralf Wenzel,
the founder and CEO of
FoodPanda and former partner
of SoftBank, JOKR had
raised more than $170 million
by July from financiers including
Tiger Global and GGV
Capital.
Gorillas in the midst
Gorillas, a Berlin-based
app launched in June 2020 by
Kagan Sümer, quickly became
the first European startup
to achieve “unicorn status,”
raising more than $1 billion in
less than a year with the help
of investors including Coatue
Management, DST Global and
Atlantic Food Labs.
With warehouses dotted
across Europe, New York City
has always been “the biggest
prize,” said Gorillas spokesperson
Lucas Dimini via
email.
“The grocery shopping culture
here is uniquely suited for
our business model, especially
when you consider how frequently
you see lines down the
street to get into the grocery
store,” Dimini said. “NYC is a
fast-paced city that needed an
on-demand delivery service
that could deliver what New
THE RACE TO DELIVER
NYC is a fast-paced city that
needed an on-demand delivery
service that could deliver
what New Yorkers need exactly
when they need them.
Lucas Dimini
/NS.COM
