Tag: Grocery delivery

HEB Partners with Instacart to Deliver Groceries in Austin

images-1H-E-B, the largest grocery retailer in Texas, is partnering with Instacart to deliver milk, bread, eggs and other groceries to people in Austin and Houston in an hour.

“Don’t have time to come to H-E-B? No problem. We’ll bring H-E-B to you with Instacart,” Jeff Thomas, vice president and general manager of VP Central Texas at H-E-B, said in a news statement. “Instacart’s ability to deliver on-demand clearly matches our focus of making our customers’ lives better. We are excited to offer a larger assortment of H-E-B items to customers in Austin and Houston.”

imgres-10H-E-B, based in San Antonio, is not yet providing the service in its hometown.

Instacart, based in San Francisco, is one of the fastest growing grocery delivery services in the country. It contracts with personal shoppers who deliver groceries to customers within an hour.

Instacart is offering free delivery and $10 off the first order for new customers using the promo code HEBLOVE through Sept. 30.

H-E-B, with sales of more than $22 billion, operates more than 360 stores in Texas and Mexico.

Postmates Launches in Austin and Wants to be the Fedex of Home Delivery

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Bastian Lehmann, CEO of Postmates, which is launching in Austin, photo courtesy of Postmates

Bastian Lehmann, CEO of Postmates, which is launching in Austin, photo courtesy of Postmates

The self-proclaimed “Uber” of on demand delivery, Postmates, has launched in Austin.

The San Francisco-based company wants to be the “FedEx” of home delivery, said Bastian Lehmann, CEO of Postmates.

Postmates chose Austin for its expansion because of high demand and a hungry consumer base wanting more delivery options, Lehmann said.

‘Austin was requested heavily,” Lehmann said. “It’s a city that has a large tech community.”

And that fits with Postmates customer profile. It provides delivery from any restaurant or store including prescriptions, groceries, dry cleaning, electronics, cosmetics, etc. around the clock and in less than an hour.

On demand delivery service sounds a lot like Kozmo, a New York-based delivery service, which raised $250 million during the dot com boom to deliver everything from videos and groceries to coffee and ice cream to homes and offices. Kozmo went out of business in 2001.

But Postmates is different, Lehmann said.

“We don’t have any inventory or delivery vans,” he said.

Logo-PostmatesThe company is like Uber or Lyft and relies on individuals and their cars and bikes to pick up goods and delivery them to their customers. It has a network of 3,000 individual delivery couriers, called Postmates, in the six cities in which it operates. It’s the largest fleet behind Uber and Lyft, Lehmann said. The company currently makes more than 15,000 deliveries weekly nationwide.

Postmates has raised $23 million in venture capital and has 56 employees. It plans to hire between two to five full time employees in Austin.

Postmates officially launched today in Austin and it’s offering a promotion including free delivery through June 15th and free mini-pies from Sugar Mama’s Bakeshop on Thursday and Friday.

The Postmates “app, available for iOS and Android, allows users to browse an inventory of thousands of restaurants and stores in their city, add items instantly, watch their rated “Postmate” (either a driver or bike messenger) moving on the map, and track their order status in real time. Deliveries start at $5 and users pay for everything within the app — including tip — so you never have to run out and get cash,” according to the company.

Postmates currently operates in San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Los Angeles. The company has driven more than $12 million in revenue to local businesses and paid more than $5 million to its couriers.

Photo courtesy of Postmates

Photo courtesy of Postmates

Austin’s delivery zone for Postmates includes downtown, South Congress, Zilker, Tarrytown, Rosedale, UT Campus, West Campus, part of Barton Hills, Rollingwood, West Lake Hills and most of South and East Austin. And it expects to expand even further shortly after its launch.

The on-demand delivery market is becoming a crowded one in Austin. Already, Burpy, a homegrown Longhorn startup company, offers grocery delivery. Favor, which relocated from California a few years ago, offers restaurant delivery. And Instacart, based in San Francisco, launched in Austin last month.

But the competition doesn’t worry Lehmann.

“Our competitors launched after us,” he said. “We are the leader in this space.”

And the idea is not worth anything, Lehmann said.

“The only thing that matters is the execution,” he said.

Burpy Expands to San Antonio and Houston

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Last Longhorn Startup class, Aseem Ali and a team of undergraduate students pitched Burpy, a grocery delivery service.
Now he’s running a quickly growing startup and finishing up his degree as a senior studying mechanical engineering at the University of Texas.
Burpy, which expanded into the San Antonio market on Nov. 25th, plans to launch in Houston on Monday.
That means Burpy will provide grocery service to all major markets in Texas with plans to expand to Dallas-Fort Worth and Bryan-College Station early next year.
Burpy, which used to charge a delivery fee ranging from $15 to $20, no longer charges for delivery. Since it made that move, Burpy has taken off, Ali said.
“We’ve seen amazing adoption,” he said during a recent interview.
In San Antonio, in the last few weeks, Burpy has fulfilled more than 300 orders, Ali said.
“Burpy delivers everything that you can find in a pantry or a refrigerator,” Ali said. “A lot of organic food and a lot of produce.”
The company, based in Austin, has 45 daily shoppers in San Antonio, 50 in Austin, 30 in Houston and 20 in Dallas.
In the next year, Burpy expects to do about $1 million in revenue, Ali said. He graduates in May and plans to work on the business full time.
Burpy gets its grocery items from Wal-Mart, HEB, Costco, Whole Foods. And it recently added office supplies and Office Depot.
Beyond Texas, Burpy plans to expand to Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Kansas City.
Although grocery delivery has been tried before on a large scale and flopped, Ali thinks his business will succeed where others have failed largely because the company crowdsources delivery and uses the latest technology tools to manage its workforce and orders.
Burpy doesn’t have any inventory, warehouses or expensive delivery vans. It taps into existing resources to maximize its efficiency, Ali said. The company does have a few competitors such as Greenling, but it focuses primarily on locally produced organic food.
“We can deliver Oreos and hot Cheetos,” Ali said.
Other Austin competitors include Couch Potato, Munchy Mart and Austin Grocer, but they don’t deliver an extensive inventory of items, Ali said.
Other national competitors include Peapod, Instacart, Amazon Fresh and Walmart to go, but they are not available yet in the Texas market, Ali said. He hopes to establish first mover advantage with the customer base here.
Ali attended the latest Longhorn Startup Demo Day and he said his biggest takeaway came from Billionaire Mark Cuban. It’s best to learn from history, Ali said. Webvan, one of the biggest dot com failures of all time, blew through $1 billion setting up a home grocery delivery network and then filed for bankruptcy. Amazon bought its assets in bankruptcy. It also bought out HomeGrocer, which had gone public and then its stock plummeted.
Burpy has learned from the mistakes made by others, Ali said. The company has raised some angel investment. Sai Ganesh, CTO of Audingo in Austin, is mentoring Burpy. The company is also hiring drivers.

Disclosure: Burpy is an advertiser with Silicon Hills News

Want Something? Favor Delivers to Central Austin Residents

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

78283fa6-b8cb-4ed4-802d-8bac6b9c708b_480Ever want something from the store – a sandwich, milk, batteries – but didn’t have time to get it? If you’re in central Austin, you can now use Favor.
Favor is an app based delivery service that gets customers food, drinks, or whatever else they need delivered right to the user’s location. The service is active between the hours of 11 a.m. to midnight Sunday through Wednesday and available until 2 a.m.Thursday through Saturday. Favor has a $5.00 delivery fee plus $2.00 minimum tip on top of whatever you ordered. Customers can order virtually anything as long as they have the local store name and an item description.
Favor serves the central Austin area – as far south as Oltorf and as far north as 55th street. They currently have 12 runners and are still hiring.
Founded by high school friends Zac Maurais and Ben Doherty, Favor started out in San Luis Obispo, Calif. delivering burritos and beer. The startup went though the boost incubator in San Mateo, Calif. where it was eventually funded by venture capitalist Tim Draper. Favor moved its operation to Austin as of June 5 to access a larger customer base. It has seen 2000 downloads in its first month of operations.
Favor is currently looking for a Sencha touch developer to help build more features into their app.

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