The Race to Deliver
Inside the many grocery delivery
BY KIRSTYN BRENDLEN
This is the fi rst story in a 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
or fi fteen 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
PHOTOS BY GABRIELE HOLTERMANN
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 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
co-founder 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
A Fridge No More delivery worker goes on a run in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
One of the “Fridge No More” locations is on 4th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
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