THE RACE T
Inside the many grocery delivery
By Kirstyn Brendlen
This is the first story in amNewYork
Metro’s five-part series examining the
proliferation of grocery delivery services
across the city — and the impact
they’re having on residents and brickand
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 or fifteen 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 megawarehouse
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,” microwarehouses
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 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,
Caribbean L 32 ife, OCT. 29-NOV. 4, 2021
A Fridge No More delivery worker goes on a run in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Photo by Gabriele Holtermann
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, all of
Manhattan below 35th Street, Midtown
East, 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 Ka an Sümer, quickly
became the first European startup to
achieve “unicorn status,” raising more
than $1 billion in less than a year with
One of the ‘Fridge No More’ locations is on 4th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Photo by Gabriele Holtermann