DailyDirt: Food Delivery

Business Models

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

After the dot-com bust, Webvan was often cited as one of the biggest flops — throwing way too much money at a venture that had not proven its business model at all. But grocery delivery services still have some potential to change the way people shop for food, and Webvan itself isn’t quite dead. A growing number of grocery stores (from Walmart, Safeway, Netgrocer, Peapod, etc) are expanding home delivery services. Here are just a few interesting stories about having groceries delivered to your door.

• Home delivery trucks for groceries can produce 20%-75% less carbon dioxide than having the same households driving to stores individually. This conclusion was published in the Journal of the Transportation Research Forum, and one of the authors says, “It’s like a bus for groceries.” [url]
• Dozens of companies around the Bay Area are working on online grocery stores and delivery services — and there still doesn’t seem to be an obvious solution to the problem of getting the profit margins right for perishable food deliveries. A bunch of these start-ups are losing money in the short term, but there seems to be a market for delivered groceries. Some details about how the service and fees work still need to be figured out, however. [url]
• AmazonFresh is expanding beyond Seattle to Los Angeles — slowly building up the re-vamped Webvan service with plans to serve more cities in 2014. Amazon has been working out the kinks of delivering perishable items since 2007, so we might actually see some disruption in the grocery industry. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: delivery, food, groceries, perishable, transportation
Companies: amazon, netgrocer, peapod, safeway, walmart, webvan