Misfits Market Teams With Gopuff as Shoppers Demand Instant eGrocery

Online shoppers want options for a wider range of grocery occasions, not just their weekly haul, Misfits Market CEO Abhi Ramesh said.

The online grocer on Wednesday (April 17) announced a partnership with Gopuff to leverage its perishable supply chain and operational capabilities to enable near-instant delivery of  fresh products. In an interview with PYMNTS, Ramesh said the move aims to meet consumers’ expectations that they will be able to get groceries online not only to stock their fridges and pantries at a regular cadence but also for their last-minute needs.

“That demand is a little different from the demand on the Misfits side,” Ramesh said. “For Misfits, it’s someone who’s planning their full grocery trip every week and buying all of their items to cook. For Gopuff, it’s really the quick convenience items. … There’s a lot of demand for because they’re often last-minute buys even at a grocery store, and Gopuff can now replicate that.”

He said those purchases include, for instance, fresh produce items that consumers may go through more quickly than their weekly shopping trip can accommodate as well as items they may realize they need if, for instance, they are preparing to host guests.

Misfits Market and Gopuff have shared investors, with Accel and D1 Capital having backed each of them. As such, according to Ramesh, this integration has “always been a long-term part of our roadmap.”

The move to integrate perishables into Gopuff comes as many consumers seek platforms that let them buy their groceries from a unified app that meets more of their day-to-day needs. The PYMNTS Intelligence study “Consumer Interest in an Everyday App,” created in collaboration with PayPal, finds that, among the 35% of U.S. consumers who expressed a strong desire for an everyday app, 69% would want to purchase groceries from such an app.

The same study’s survey of nearly 1,800 U.S. consumers revealed that, among those who had shopped for groceries in the previous month, 61% did so online at least some of the time.

Granted, quick commerce in grocery has not always succeeded. Throughout 2022 and early 2023, there was a spate of shutdowns and acquisitions. Even larger players with established audiences and delivery networks have retreated from the category. Last summer, DoorDash shut down its 15-minute delivery test.

Ramesh said this partnership will skirt these challenges, because unlike one company trying to manage everything from the instant delivery infrastructure to the perishable supply chain business, a collaboration enables each company to stick to its expertise.

“Those companies tried to do it in-house, and I think it’s really hard to be good at a lot of different things,” he said. “Gopuff is phenomenal at the convenience delivery piece, but they’re not a perishable supply chain company. We are, and so that’s why this is different.”

Right now, shoppers are being more conservative in their grocery spending now than they are at times of fewer economic challenges. A PYMNTS Intelligence survey from January reveals that 86% of grocery customers have made changes to their purchasing behavior in response to price increases, with the most common shift being cutting back on nonessential purchases.

Looking forward, Misfits Market sees the opportunity to continue to roll out its supply chain capabilities as a service even while still operating its own eGrocery platform, much the way that Amazon runs its first-party business and sells its operational infrastructure to other brands.

“We’ve always had, I think, this long-term view that the operational infrastructure in the supply chain that we have built, specifically around perishable products, is a core competency,” Ramesh said. “They are something that a lot of other companies don’t have but want. … We are, in a sense, building the Amazon for perishables.”