The grocery industry has always been highly competitive and dominated by a handful of larger players. For the most part, consumers shopped at their nearest store, loaded up their own baskets, checked out and drove off with their orders.
The pandemic turned that model on its head. The uptick in online food shopping and same-day grocery delivery has pushed the industry into new territory. Seemingly overnight, grocery retailers faced roadblocks that never existed before in their sector.
What’s changed?
Proximity to physical stores was always a key selection factor for consumers. Now, the focus has shifted to stores that make it easy to shop online and deliver quickly.
Consumers like shopping for groceries online. According to the Food Marketing Institute, 64% of all U.S. shoppers have bought groceries online, and 29% of online grocery shoppers order more than once a week.
To adapt, grocery retailers have found new ways to meet the rise of online food shopping. That includes adding same-day delivery. Doing so keeps customers coming back for more, while positioning grocery retailers for success in their ever-evolving marketplace.
The Roadie difference
More and more grocery retailers have partnered with Roadie to make sure they can offer competitive order arrival times as they make same-day a bigger part of their business. Crowdsourced delivery helps grocers get customers what they need — whether it’s essentials for the week, a specialty ingredient for tonight’s dinner or bulk goods on sale — with a cold-chain compliant process that ensures perishables are handled quickly and with care. Same-day grocery delivery gives companies of all sizes a dynamic and efficient solution that flexes to meet delivery demand.
With Roadie’s nationwide network of independent drivers and a same-day delivery radius of 100 miles, grocers can expand their footprints and fulfill more consumer orders than ever before. Being able to meet high demand in dense urban areas is also important. For example, in New York City, Roadie manages deliveries for a popular online grocery delivery service that didn’t have the transportation infrastructure or staff to get its orders out the door and into its customers’ hands quickly.
Roadie facilitates an agreed-upon number of drivers available daily to manage the company’s orders, most of which are delivered to highly populated areas like Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
Roadie connects the grocer with a subset of drivers who block out time within a given day to deliver for them. This ensures on-time delivery performance and scalability to meet tight deadlines when order volume peaks.
“We don’t really tell grocery customers we can’t handle their volume,” said Sarah Byrne, project manager at Roadie. “We’re able to keep up with demand even when it fluctuates.” Reliable, on-demand and fast delivery helps grocers spend more time on their own operations instead of hiring, onboarding and training drivers — and managing a fleet of delivery vehicles.
“Crowdsourcing saves them a lot of time,” said Holtzman, “and saves them from having to run their own transportation department.”
Roadie helps you delight customers with every order
By tapping into a scalable, crowdsourced delivery network with Roadie, grocery retailers can expand their footprints and fulfill more orders faster. Cold chain compliant, Roadie enables grocers to send perishables safely and swiftly to their destinations. Drivers can cover the same territories as traditional, next-day shipping partners, while going beyond to service rural areas that aren’t always within their reach.
To further improve delivery efficiency, grocery retailers can also leverage Roadie’s batched/routed delivery option. This allows stores to combine multiple deliveries into a single streamlined batch. That way, they spend less time coordinating pickups and more time growing their businesses.
Ready to learn more? Check out our playbook to discover how pairing BODFS and crowdsourced delivery helps you win customers and keep them coming back.