Jake McPaul, an industry logistics expert who helped guide Misfits Market through rapid growth during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, has joined Warp as head of refrigerated operations and product in the middle-mile tech company’s new Fresh Freight division.
The company made the announcement Thursday.
McPaul was the first director of logistics for Misfits Market from July 2019 through May 2021, coinciding with the first year-plus of shutdowns from COVID and the rapid explosion of that firm’s business. In April 2021, Misfits closed a $200 million Series C funding round before adding another $225 million in a Series C-1 in September 2021. Its valuation at the time surpassed $2 billion.
Misfits Market saw its order volume grow five times in 2020 over 2019, shipping more than 77 million pounds of food to more than 400,000 customers in 2020. In the first four months of 2021, the company reported it had surpassed the 2020 totals.
McPaul left Misfits in May 2021 to join Smallhold as vice president of supply chain. At Smallhold, a mushroom producer focused on using tech and logistics to supply consumers, restaurants and grocery stores, McPaul was tasked with building the company’s first supply chain. That included sourcing raw materials, packing procurement and design, inventory and shipping.
Prior to Misfits Market, McPaul spent more than three years at Blue Apron and also worked at global logistics leader C.H. Robinson.
At Warp, McPaul will be tasked with leading the Fresh Freight division’s operations. Fresh Freight is a new division for Warp and focuses on temperature-controlled transportation and cross-docking solutions within the less-than-truckload market.
“Refrigerated transportation and cross-docking solutions have been a struggle for the last decade that I’ve been in the industry,” McPaul said. “The pandemic exacerbated this. The industry desperately needs a tech-enabled quality temp-controlled LTL network. People have just been too scared to try it because it’s arguably the most difficult problem to solve in the entire logistics industry.”
Warp said it will combine temperature-controlled carriers with separate temperature-controlled storage facilities and crossdocks overlaid with Warp technology to control truck times and increase visibility during every step of the process.
Delivery options will include direct-store deliveries to restaurants, zone skipping or direct-carrier injections into last-mile providers and inbound pickups from farms to manufacturing/production facilities. Warp is able to physically consolidate product at Warp temperature-controlled stations or digitally consolidate perishable goods on trucks for delivery.
“Warp’s willingness to lean into problems like this and reimagine networks that can provide customers with the transparency and flexibility needed in the modern world is what drew me to the company,” McPaul said. “As someone who spent time on both the ‘client side’ as a shipper and service provider at C.H. Robinson, you only need to spend a little time with our team to know you’ll be able to sleep better at night trusting us with your most important freight.”
McPaul will primarily be responsible for providing temp-controlled solutions to the largest perishable shippers in the world. He and his dedicated team will also focus on building out a new temperature-controlled LTL network across the U.S., Warp said.
Warp was founded by Daniel Sokolovsky, who had previously founded AxleHire, and Troy Lester to digitally connect customers to delivery capacity in the middle mile — a critical link in the supply chain that enables last-mile delivery to succeed. The company announced a $2.4 million seed-funding round led by Bee Partners in February.
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