There’s something old-world about having a smartly dressed delivery man knock on your door with your bread, milk and meats. But grocerygateway isn’t the green grocer of simpler times. It’s a dotcom delivery operation that has a complex high-tech engine behind it.
I first started using grocerygateway.com last year. It made sense to shop for supplies on the Web. As an urban dweller without a car, I usually spend two hours and $15 in cab fares doing groceries.
Since the dotcom grocer came along, I spend 15 to 20 minutes every week, sometimes well after midnight, browsing the virtual aisles and culling from previous grocery orders saved electronically in my account. It costs me an $8 delivery charge and my grocery bill is perhaps 10 per cent more expensiveÑpretty much a break-even proposition when I consider my cab fareÑthough it’s a huge time savings.
Delivery appointments are booked by selecting a three-to-four hour time window from the service’s Web site. Minimum notice is 24 hours, but you can order up to a week ahead of time. As sure as bananas are yellow, a uniformed employee shows up with boxes of groceries.
In a year of using the service, they missed the delivery window once. They called to apologize and gave me the $85 order for free. Two other times, when they thought they would be late, they provided a $20 credit on my subsequent orders.
That was early on, when they were still sweeping the electronic bugs out of the process. Recently, there hasn’t been a single service problem, and I use them almost every week.
I buy everything from kitty litter to tofu, though my pesto sauce has certainly suffered. Grocerygateway.com pricing on fresh basil and pine nuts is prohibitive so I only make it when I find the time to take the streetcar down to Toronto’s famed Kensington Market.
The other downside to online groceries is that there’s no touch test. You don’t get to squeeze the Charmin or inspect the tomatoes. A team of faceless, yet efficient employees do that for you.
Ordering bananas by the gram is also difficult to gauge. Is 100 grams of bananas one piece of fruit or three? It’s hard to say.
However, the produce is always fresh and of the highest quality. Where you might settle for sub-standard tomatoes in a retail grocery store because of limited selection that never happens with grocerygateway.com. There has been only one vegetable crisis. A green pepper arrived crushed, but customer service promptly credited the cost on the next order.
There have also been some oddities. An unexpected butternut squash turned up in one order, but there was no charge. In another order, a can of Betty Crocker icing was the bonus prize. Again, no charge, but that was on a week when I was trying to trim-down. The temptation led to home-baked low-fat banana muffins (good), with the icing slathered on them (very bad).
Periodically the company arrives without certain items because they are out of stock. They promise to substitute missing products with higher-value products or similar brands, but that’s yet to happen. When you need walnuts for the Waldorf salad on short notice this is a problem.
The operation was started in 1996 in company president Bill Di Nardo’s basement. He and five others have since grown the company to hundreds of employees and 140,000 registered users. They did this with $80 million in financing from a variety of investors including the Torstar Corp., the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board and venture capital firm Mosaic Venture Partners.
Make no mistake, the business is not a grocery operation despite obvious evidence.
“We’re in the delivery and fulfilment business,” affirmed John Mozas, the company’s VP Marketing and one of its co-founders.
In the early days employees would pick items from the shelves at Longo’s, a suburban grocery chain. In phase two the company began packing operations from a 75,000 sq. ft. warehouse in Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto. Last summer, the company moved to a new 280,000 sq. ft. high-tech facility, a former airplane hangar in Downsview, Ontario.
The company now delivers groceries, office supplies and even furniture. By the end of this year there will be 10,000 to 12,000 products to choose from.
“Starting as an on-line grocery business was a natural one because you are in a customer’s home 30 to 50 times a year,” Mozas explained. “Once we’re established in a neighbourhood, there’s a fixed cost for being there.”
Grocerygateway.com only operates in the Greater Toronto area. Mozas said that’s by design. The company wanted to get it right before expanding into other markets. This approach has allowed the company to avoid the fate of many dotcom disasters, including Webvan.com, a failed online grocer in the United States.
Here’s hoping this cautious approach continues to succeed, pesto sauce or not.
