In the past few years, a spate of instant-grocery start-ups with names like Gopuff, Getir, Buyk, and Fridge No More have hoovered up billions of dollars in venture investment. They’ve spent these windfalls lavishly – opening hundreds of new warehouses, poaching executives from Amazon and Uber, adding new product categories, and hiring a standing army’s worth of new staff, all in an attempt to become the One True Deliverer of, say, a couple pints of ice cream, a six-pack, and that one ingredient you forgot to buy for the new recipe you’re trying out.
The companies flourished amid a surge in pre-vaccine demand for grocery delivery, bolstered by the apparent belief that growth would continue even as the pandemic waned. But according to a story in Bloomberg, that theory hasn’t panned out for these companies any more profitably than it did for their predecessors.
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