Tech Companies Providing Free Solutions to Grocers

Grocers are on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, keeping up with increasing demands in ecommerce, challenges to stock replenishment, customers cooking more at home as a consequence of the mandated closure of many restaurants, and much more. To ease this burden, some technology companies are offering their solutions to grocers at no cost to help with the retailers' coronavirus response.

Delivery

Bringg is providing BringgNow as a free solution to help small- and medium- size businesses immediately launch and scale delivery operations for customers,which the company described as a "fully branded, real-time Uber-like experience."

“The world is facing a crisis, and we are seeing businesses across every sector and market look to new solutions in order to adapt to the new normal everyone is experiencing,” said Guy Bloch, CEO of Tel Aviv-based Bringg, whose other office locations include Evanston, Ill., and Austin, Texas. “In seeing the tremendous rise in demand around the world for delivery, we felt a community obligation to accelerate the release of this solution to provide businesses a free and easy tool to enable them to start, grow and manage online delivery.”

Features include effortless onboarding, simplified order creation and management, controlled fleet management, smart order dispatch, and empowered driver solutions.

supply chain

Murray, Utah-based ReposiTrak Inc. has made its ReposiTrak Marketplace online database of compliance-vetted suppliers with more than 30,000 category participants available free to retailers during this time. 

Retailers can search by product category to discover new suppliers, see a supplier’s compliance performance with other companies and make direct contact with suppliers that look promising.

“In these extraordinary times, we felt it was necessary to do our part as a company to support the grocery industry and strengthen food retailer supply chains,” said ReposiTrak Chairman and CEO Randy Fields. “Retailers can use MarketPlace to identify additional or alternative suppliers to fill a product need, knowing that they can check the vendor’s compliance behaviors with other retailers and easily contact the supplier directly.”

shoppable recipes

In response to the massive growth in online grocery usage and recipe usage habits during the coronavirus outbreak, New York-based Chicory is providing its Recipe Activation (shoppable recipes) and Click-to-Cart (shoppable links, which can be used for any consumer touchpoint like social media or email) technology at no charge through May 31, 2020.

"We've observed a 111% increase in recipe traffic over the past 10 days, which equates to millions more Americans using recipes while homebound during this crisis," said Chicory CEO and co-founder Yuni Sameshima. "Many consumers at home are cooking things for the first time, so we wanted to offer a channel for the grocery industry to help shoppers during this time by making content like recipes and how-to guides shoppable at online grocery retailers."

Retailers and brands alike can offer customers a one-click solution for shopping all of the ingredients for a recipe and having them placed into their shopping carts for purchase.