A Street Fight Among Grocers to Deliver Your groceries

Every couple of days, Sinclair Browne fights through traffic in Times Square, squeezes his delivery truck into a parking spot, walks up four flights of stairs and delivers groceries to a guy whose order he knows by heart. “I’m fast,” said Mr. Browne, slicing his hands in the air, ninja style. “In and out, in and out.” Delivering food requires military precision: Bananas can’t get cold. Produce can’t get warm. Eggs, of course, must not get broken. And people expect their food to arrive at specific times.

Mr. Browne, 40, is a driver for the online grocery business Peapod. He plays the most important role in solving the biggest problem vexing the online grocery industry: moving food, undamaged and unspoiled, from the warehouse to the customer’s house. It’s known as the last-mile problem. Delivering perishables is much trickier than delivering T-shirts, books or pretty much anything else people can buy online. The biggest challenge is that groceries must stay cold for hours at a time. But there are myriad other complications, too. Bananas and apples give off fumes that can hurt loose leaf lettuce, so they can’t be stored too close. Tomatoes lose flavor when they cool to below 55 degrees. Milk always has to be packaged upright.

Sinclair Browne, a driver for the online grocery business Peapod, navigates the “last-mile problem” — the troublesome task of getting a food order from the warehouse to the customer’s door — in New York City. All the complexity adds costs in an industry where profit margins are already thin. Few businesses have attempted these kinds of gastronomic acrobatics on a large scale, and numerous start-ups have failed trying, making groceries the last frontier of online shopping.

Even Amazon, which built a multi-billion-dollar business by perfecting its delivery logistics, hasn’t quite mastered the art of profitably delivering perishable food in big metropolitan areas. But it just made a big bet, purchasing Whole Foods in a $13.4 billion deal that will give it access to more than 400 stores concentrated around major population centers — places that may have walk-up apartments, aggressive taxi drivers and other urban obstacles that Mr. Browne navigates five days a week. Amazon’s deal sets up a face-off with Walmart, the nation’s largest grocery store. Walmart itself is struggling to become as dominant in the virtual world as it is in the physical one.

Read more at The New York Times