GrubMarket Acquires Daylight Foods

Business is one of the biggest foodservice companies in California

2/23/2022

Daylight Foods is a major provider of high-quality produce, dairy and specialty goods across California.

Food tech company GrubMarket has wrapped up the acquisition of Daylight Foods, one of the biggest foodservice businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area. Daylight works with farms throughout California to provide fresh food to a diverse customer base of restaurants, grocery stores, corporate offices and universities, and is a major provider of high-quality produce, dairy and specialty goods across the state. The acquired business will continue to be managed by its current leadership team.

Founded almost 50 years ago as a small San Jose, Calif., farmers’ market by original owner Bob Vlahopouliotis, Daylight is now run by Bob’s son, Chris, who became president of the company in 2003. The company is now a full-service food wholesale and delivery business with a warehouse measuring more than 100,000 square feet in size with processing rooms, state-of-the-art coolers, repacking areas and loading docks. Daylight is also committed to sustainability: Along with conventional items, it sources seasonal, organic and locally grown produce, and deploys eco-friendly hybrid diesel-electric delivery trucks. In 2021, the company packed and delivered several million USDA Farmers to Families food boxes to households and homeless shelters throughout the Bay Area.

“We are excited to join the GrubMarket team and welcome the opportunities brought forth by joining GrubMarket,” said Chris Vlahopouliotis, CEO of Union City, Calif.-based Daylight. “With GrubMarket’s robust technology platform and strong e-commerce supply and demand network, we will continue to be Northern California’s premier foodservice provider. We are thrilled to learn that GrubMarket shares our long-term goals and has built out such a well-integrated and much-needed e-commerce and technology-enabled platform to bring fresh food to so many people across the country. We sincerely look forward to joining the GrubMarket team and bringing more premium and farmer-direct fresh food to our customers.”

“Daylight Foods’ reputation in California’s farmer-direct food supply chain ecosystem is unmatched,” noted Mike Xu, CEO of San Francisco-based GrubMarket, which has been busy acquiring businesses in various regions of the United States and Canada as part of its expansion strategy. “It has been incredible to see how the business has grown with over 50 years of hard work and passion. Chris and the outstanding team at Daylight Foods have scaled the company to hundreds of millions in sales with high gross margins and profitability. In addition, they are mission-driven, with strong ESG practices around food waste and carbon footprint reduction, which aligns with our sustainability goals. This acquisition enables GrubMarket to further strengthen our customer base across the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California. We are excited to welcome the Daylight Foods team to the GrubMarket family.”

As part of GrubMarket’s portfolio, Daylight will now make use of GrubMarket’s proprietary WholesaleWare software suite, the company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that offers food industry wholesalers and distributors seamless financial management, easy-to-use sales and online ordering features, precise inventory management, lot traceability and tracking, grower accounting, and automated routing and logistics tools.

Founded in 2014, GrubMarket operates in food supply chain e-commerce space for both business customers and end consumers, in addition to providing related SaaS solutions. The company now operates in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington and the Canadian province of British Columbia, with plans to expand to the rest of the United States, Canada and other parts of the world.