THE RACE
Inside the many grocery
BY KIRSTYN BRENDLEN
This is the fi rst story in am-
NewYork Metro’s fi ve-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 fi lled
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 serves
about one square
mile, said Tyler
Trerotola, a US cofounder
of the app. The
company uses a software that
calculates how far an eightminute
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.
A Fridge No More delivery worker goes on a run in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Photo by Gabriele Holtermann
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 fi nanciers
including Tiger Global and
GGV Capital.
Gorillas in the midst
app launched in June 2020 by
Ka an Sümer, quickly became
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COURIER L 2 IFE, OCTOBER 22-28, 2021
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THE
RACE RACE TO TO
DELIVER
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