26 THE QUEENS COURIER • OCTOBER 21, 2021 FOR BREAKING NEWS VISIT WWW.QNS.COM
Inside the many grocery delivery
BY KIRSTYN BRENDLEN
editorial@qns.com
@QNS
Th is is the fi rst story in Schneps Media’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.
Th ey 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. Th eir
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. Th e company
uses a soft ware 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. Th e 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 Soft Bank, 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 Kağan Sümer, quickly
became the fi rst 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.
“Th e 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.”
Th e 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 Leff erts Gardens on
Oct. 30.
“Each Gorillas warehouse is strategical-
The Race to Deliver
Photo by Gabriele Holtermann
“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
THE RACE
TO
DELIVER
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