Farmstead Updates Grocery OS Solution
E-grocer and tech startup Farmstead has joined forces with national real estate companies and various national last-mile delivery services to create what it said is the first end-to-end same-day e-commerce operations solution for grocers.
According to the company, its Grocery OS offering now provides everything that a retailer needs to get a dark-store delivery operation up and running in just two weeks. Features include:
- Grocery OS application programming interfaces for writing and centralizing customer orders in dark stores (or retailers’ existing stores) from retailers’ own apps and third-party marketplaces
- Warehouse space sourced through national real estate companies
- Optional grocery inventory sourcing and stocking for rapid rollout using the Grocery OS product supply network
- A Grocery OS software stack for managing online order intake, inventory management with an artificial-intelligence prediction engine and automatic procurement, picking and packing, and customer communications
- Optional dark-store labor sourced through Grocery OS partners
- Last-mile delivery with guaranteed two-hour delivery service across a 50-mile radius, with optional under-one-hour delivery
- Optional inclusion on third-party delivery service marketplaces
“Right now, rapid grocery delivery comes with high markups and fees, and Farmstead wants to change that,” noted Pradeep Elankumaran, co-founder and CEO of Burlingame, Calif.-based Farmstead. “Grocery OS helps grocers vastly improve efficiency, so they can eliminate fees and make money on e-commerce without passing fees down to customers, and without relying on expensive third-party services. The combination of Grocery OS and dark stores enables faster delivery, a much larger delivery radius and higher profits per order, while customers get lower prices. We’ve been doing this ourselves for several years, and are now offering it to other grocers.”
Launched in 2020, Farmstead’s Grocery OS was originally a software-only solution. In a pilot with a top-three national grocer, Grocery OS was found to lower delivery operational costs while accelerating delivery times to less than two hours and considerably improving customer satisfaction. Other retailers have since implemented the solution, most recently Honolulu-based Farm Link Hawaii.
“While our Grocery OS software greatly simplified grocery delivery for our customers, we saw them still struggling with bringing a unified solution to market,” added Elankumaran. “Our new solution removes those barriers and enables our customers to get their new delivery operations into the market even faster.”
As for its own e-commerce operations, the company has previously disclosed plans to expand nationwide to a primarily suburban, mid-market audience.
Using AI technology, Farmstead is working to significantly reduce food waste and fulfill its goal of making locally sourced high-quality food accessible to all. The company offers Grocery OS, to grocers that want to improve operations and compete more effectively against the major e-commerce players.
