Grubhub Rolls Out Quick Commerce Play

Grubhub announced today it has joined the race for hyperfast local delivery of grocery and convenience items via a new partnership with Buyk.

What’s Buyk you might ask? It’s a New York City-based “real-time retail” startup launched last year promising local delivery of grocery and convenience items in 15-minutes or less.

The two companies plan to roll out the service in New York and Chicago in the coming weeks, featuring more than 2,000 SKUs and offering Buyk’s 15-minutes or less pledge.


This announcement comes on the heels of Grubtech’s launch of Grubtech Goods. This is a partnership with 7-Eleven to offer convenient goods delivery from 3,000 locations nationwide.

And it comes just a week after Doordash announced a “30-minutes or less” express grocery delivery service in partnership with Albertson’s.

“We’re excited to work with Buyk and together deliver everyday essentials and grocery items even faster to our diners,” said Grubhub’s Director of New Verticals Kyle Goings.

“This partnership will make the Grubhub Marketplace a one-stop shop for restaurants, convenience items, and grocery supplies, building more diner loyalty and helping drive even more orders to all of our restaurant and merchant partners. We’re thrilled to add Buyk to expand the number of options and delivery speed available to our diners.”

No, Six-Minute Abs

The emergence of quick commerce, dark stores, real-time retail, whichever term you want to use, is fascinating. It’s as if logistics management were an extreme sport. Sponsored by Red Bull.

Or maybe it’s like that scene in “There’s Something About Mary”. It’s the one where the creepy hitchhiker (Harland Williams) tells Ted (Ben Stiller) that he’s going to get rich by besting the “Eight-Minute Abs” exercise video. How, you might ask? Well, by coming out with a “Seven-Minute Abs” video of course.

YouTube player

But in quick commerce, it’s not about how fast you can produce six-pack abs. It’s how fast you can produce a six-pack of beer.

In Europe, where this space is arguably overbuilt, we’ve seen players compete on shaving seconds off a rival’s promised delivery time. Soon beer will appear as soon as you feel thirsty. Kind of like Minority Report meets Gopuff.

This is what we wrote last year about the scene in Europe.

“All of these brands — Gorillas, Dija, Zapp, Glovo, Bolt, and others — have been in a race to the bottom, offering faster, cheaper delivery as a way to differentiate and grab share. First, it was 15 minutes. Then 10 minutes. If this continues, five minutes can’t be far behind. That would require a ghost store on every block. But if that’s what it takes to win, then so be it.”

Logistics Management as a Contact Sport

Local grocery/sundries delivery services have typically followed two service models. One, typified by Instacart, involves sending gig workers into participating stores and buying selected goods at retail.

The other model is typified by Amazon. This involves using proprietary warehouses to assemble orders. And then dispatch them through a network of drivers for delivery within a promised time period. In big cities, the drivers are likely to be on bicycles.

The advantage of the Instacart model is that it is asset-light. You are simply inserting your army of shoppers into the existing infrastructure. However, this model is not going to cut it if you want to promise hyperfast delivery.

That requires much more control over the entire process. This means opening a network of dark stores, or mini-warehouses, located strategically throughout a service area so that the same delivery time performance can be assured regardless of where the order is placed.

Byuk is firmly in the mini-warehouse model. Here is how it describes the service on its website.

Couriers on bicycles, we call them «buykers», deliver goods from a Store — a compact, efficient storeroom — located near you. Orders are collected within 2 minutes and then delivered within another 5-10 minutes.

Philadelphia-based Gopuff is the big cheese in the U.S. dark store space. The company operates more than 400 micro-fulfillment centers throughout the country. In addition, last year it acquired BevMo, which added 650 liquor stores to its infrastructure.

This is where logistics management becomes a contact sport. And where in a hyper-competitive environment, the pressure will inevitably mount to up the ante on faster delivery times. We will likely soon see this race to achieve the “Seven Minute Abs” of grocery delivery take root in America’s biggest cities.

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