18 OCTOBER 21, 2021 RIDGEWOOD TIMES WWW.QNS.COM
THE RACE TO DELIVER
Inside the many grocery delivery
BY KIRSTYN BRENDLEN
EDITORIAL@QNS.COM
@QNS
This 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 brickand
mortar business owners alike.
In a city where the sight of delivery
workers whizzing by on electric bicycles
with insulated bags strapped
to their backs 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 10 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, which 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 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 U.S. co-founder of the app.
The 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 10, delivering to Williamsburg,
Long Island City, lower
Manhattan, the Upper East Side and
the Upper West Side. The company
expects to open an additional 10 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.
“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
A Fridge No More delivery worker goes on a run in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Photos by Gabriele Holtermann
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