Food delivery apps are hungry. After building themselves up as the go-to options for restaurant delivery, brands like Uber Eats and Grubhub are now looking to grocery as the next delivery frontier.
Uber Eats (NYSE: UBER) kicked off its campaign last June through a partnership with Albertsons Cos. that brought same-day grocery delivery to 400 U.S. cities, while Grubhub (OCTUS: JTKWY) started its own grocery vertical in February via partnerships with 7-Eleven and ultrafast delivery startup Buyk.
Not to be outdone, DoorDash (NYSE: DASH), the third member of the American food delivery triumvirate, is introducing a grocery delivery offering through DoorDash Drive, the company’s white-label fulfillment platform.
On Wednesday, DoorDash and retail food industry e-commerce company eGrowcery announced a partnership that will allow retailers on the eGrowcery platform to leverage DoorDash’s nationwide fulfillment network for grocery orders while retaining their own shopper data.
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A white-label service provider itself, eGrowcery equips food retailers with an e-commerce platform that integrates with existing point-of-sale and back-office systems. Founded in 2010, the Michigan-based company offers a picking app with integrated payment capture, sales reporting, picking routes and a built-in barcode scanner to eliminate the need for paper checklists and manual scanning.
But eGrowcery’s offering is also targeted at shoppers. Much like DoorDash, the company’s website features a shopper-centric design that enables rapid checkout, personal shopping lists, one-click reordering, filters and predictive search among other features. The platform also gives food retailers the ability to reconfigure their e-commerce sites for a better customer experience with an array of settings and promotional tools.
“By teaming up with DoorDash, we are able to offer our retail customers a turnkey solution to help them address their local commerce needs. The combination of eGrowcery’s intuitive shopping experience and fully integrated fulfillment process with DoorDash’s scale and convenience is very compelling,” said Patrick Hughes, CEO of eGrowcery. “All of these benefits and retailers maintain a direct connection with shoppers through their own branded app, enabling them to profitably grow their business.”
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With a DoorDash Drive partnership in tow, eGrowcery can now offer customers access to DoorDash’s extensive courier network, which comprised 3 million drivers in Q4 2021 according to the company’s most recent earnings report.
But unlike DoorDash, which owns its merchant partners’ data outright and has refused to share it with them in the past, the new eGrowcery integration will give grocery retailers full control over their shopper data, as well as the ability to build the e-commerce experience that they want across multiple formats like mobile, desktop and tablet.
The integration with DoorDash Drive comes two months after eGrowcery announced a partnership with independent grocer Rouses Markets, also based in Michigan. Through that agreement, eGrowcery delivers a branded e-commerce experience for Rouses Markets shoppers to enable curbside pickup of grocery orders.
Now the fledgling e-commerce platform can add home delivery to that package.
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