Freshdirect Company Profile the Company

¶ … FreshDirect Company Profile

The company FreshDirect was founded in 1999 by Jason Ackerman, a former investment banking expert in the field of supermarket mergers and acquisitions who brought expertise in the area of perishable and packaged goods supply chain management to the start-up. What differentiates FreshDirect from its many competitors and from the previous generation of Internet-based grocers is its focus on the cook-to-order approach to managing the fulfillment of grocery orders from its customers throughout the New York City Metro Area (Laseter, Berg, Turner, 2003). While privately funded the company generates an estimated $200 million per year in sales and has 250,000 customers throughout the Metro New York Area (Fickenscher, 2009).

The total available market for online grocers in the New York Metro area per year is estimated to be $40B total per year, with $29B in groceries and $11B in commercial catering including support for meeting planners, events and hotels (Laseter, Berg, Turner, 2003). The company has a Processing Center in Long Island City that is located close enough to Manhattan, making up to 4 million people serviceable within a 10-mile radius. The company also differentiates itself from the previous generation of Internet-based grocers by only delivering between 4pm to 6pm, quite a departure from the 6AM to 10PM operating hours of Webvan. Beginning in 2008 the company branched out to delivery routes in the suburbs of Westchester County, NY. This was in addition to their expanded coverage in 2005 outside of the five boroughs of New York City to include service to New Jersey cities of Jersey City and Hoboken. Despite this expansion however the company has continued to stay focused on its unique strategy of using the Internet to streamline and make more efficient its supply chain, sourcing and procurement strategies. What further differentiates FreshDirect from its many competitors is that it also concentrates on the assemble-to-order for its meals and entire orders, comparable in execution of this strategy to Dell Computer and their production of customized PCs (Laseter, Berg, Turner, 2003).