BY KIRSTYN BRENDLEN
This is the fi rst story in the Bronx
TImes’ 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 InstaCart
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 microwarehouse
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 co-founder 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.”
Inside the many grocery deliv
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 fi nanciers
including Tiger Global and GGV
Capital.
Gorillas in the midst
Gorillas, a Berlin-based app
launched in June 2020 by Ka an Sümer,
quickly became the fi rst European
BRONX TIMES REPORTER, O 8 CT. 22-28, 2021 BTR
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 Yorkers
need exactly when they need them.”
The company made its fi rst foray in
the city in May, Dimini said, making
deliveries in Bushwick and Downtown
Brooklyn. It has expanded rapidly in the
following fi ve months, operating more
than 11 warehouses citywide and delivering
to wide swaths of Manhattan,
Long Island City, and Williamsburg,
with plans to open more in the coming
weeks — including one in Prospect Lefferts
Gardens on Oct. 30.
“Each Gorillas warehouse is strategically
located to target a specifi c neighborhood,
reaching a dense population,”
he said. “We only place a warehouse if
we feel fully confi dent that we can deliver
to the specifi ed radius on time.
That said, larger neighborhoods have
two warehouses if necessary, and customers
must physically be within range
One of the “Fridge No More” locations is on 4th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
THE RACE
TO
DELIVER