BURLINGAME, Calif. — Tech startup Farmstead announced that it has partnered with national real estate companies and multiple national last-mile delivery services to create the first end-to-end same-day e-commerce operations solution for grocers.
Farmstead’s Grocery OS solution now includes everything a grocer or retailer needs to get a dark-store delivery operation up and running in just two weeks including:
- Grocery OS APIs for writing and centralizing customer orders into dark stores (and optionally retailers’ existing stores) from retailers’ own apps and third-party marketplaces
- Warehouse space sourced via national real estate giants
- Optional grocery inventory sourcing and stocking for rapid rollout using the Grocery OS product supply network
- Grocery OS software stack for managing online order intake, inventory management with AI prediction engine and automatic procurement, picking and packing, and customer communications
- Optional dark store labor sourced via Grocery OS partners
- Last mile delivery with guaranteed 2-hr delivery service across a 50-mile radius, with optional <1-hr 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,” said Pradeep Elankumaran, co-founder and CEO of 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.”
Farmstead’s Grocery OS, launched in 2020, was originally a software-only solution. In a pilot with a top-3 national grocer, Grocery OS was proven to reduce delivery operational costs while accelerating delivery times to under two hours and significantly improving customer satisfaction. Other retailers have since adopted the solution, including most recently 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,” said Elankumaran. “Our new solution removes those barriers and enables our customers to get their new delivery operations into the market even faster.”
To learn more about Farmstead’s Grocery OS, visit https://www.farmsteadapp.com/groceryos.
About Farmstead
Farmstead is the first online grocer to offer fresh, high-quality groceries, delivered for free, at better prices than local supermarkets. Using artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Farmstead has reinvented the grocery buying experience and rewired how food moves across the country, to significantly reduce food waste and fulfill its mission of making high quality, locally sourced food accessible to everyone. Farmstead offers this same technology stack, Grocery OS, to grocers wishing to improve operations and compete more effectively against dominant e-commerce players. Visit https://www.farmsteadapp.com or follow @farmsteadapp.
