In the online grocery and delivery space, the Amazon effect is palpable. Any number of players are jockeying for position, hoping to gain a larger share of consumers’ minds and wallets. But with miles of aisles, the pickings are mostly packaged — and the delivery times for fresh goods may be shrinking, but they do not guarantee that fresh is….well, fresh.
One firm, Milk and Eggs, operating regionally in the L.A. area, seeks to fill a niche in the online grocery landscape.
Where Kroger and the bigger players in the space operate from shelves, packing items that need to be delivered along the last mile, the mile can be long from source to the person who’s done the ordering.
Said Kenneth Wu, the CEO of Milk and Eggs, the traditional grocer delivery model stretches across several farms or food producers, aggregates them into warehouses, and the warehouses feed into multiple distribution centers, which in turn send wares to the grocers. Once in store, items as far flung as bread and milk and meat are unloaded onto shelves. “And everything sits there from anywhere from a day to several weeks until the customer picks it up” or places an order online.
Wu’s firm works with locally sourced items, culled from local farms and artisanal food makers, in an effort to get food in what might be as close to farm fresh as can be, and as close to “raw form” as might be expected with, say carrots or apples picked just hours before. The turnaround time can be about a day and a half from across harvest, order and delivery.
Milk and Eggs bases its online ordering system on a distribution model that is lean, and as Wu said, does not rely on a warehouse system. Find out how the streamlined process brings farm to table with haste here.
We’re always on the lookout for opportunities to partner with innovators and disruptors.
Learn More