🌶 An Update on Grocery Quick Commerce

Founded in 2013 as a late-night service for college students to order junk food, rolling papers and condoms, GoPuff has gone mainstream, and now offers 3,000 items ranging from over-the-counter medicine and laundry detergent to pet food and nail polish—all delivered in around 30 minutes for a flat $2 fee.

Yet, despite this new source of e-commerce demand, restaurants have struggled to keep up. The dominant reason is that restaurant demand is inherently “peaky.” It’s even more peaky now that delivery and pick up are turning restaurants into omni-channel retailers. Restaurants have fixed labor costs that do not scale up or down with volatile demand th... See more