Google To Start Trial of Fresh Food Deliveries To Two US Cities

[engine]

It's no wonder that Google saw Amazon as a major competitor. The more it steps into Amazon's territory, the more it goes head-to-head with the company, and wants a slice of the online sales pie.

Google Inc. will start testing a delivery service for fresh food and groceries in two U.S. cities later this year, stepping up competition with online retailer Amazon.com Inc. and startup Instacart Inc.

The trial will begin in San Francisco and another city, said Brian Elliott, general manager of Google Express, which already delivers merchandise, including dry foods, to customers. Whole Foods Market Inc. and Costco Wholesale Corp. will be among Google’s partners for the new service, he said.

"For a lot of our merchants that have been successful with this, we’re not representing the whole store today," Elliott said in an interview. "It’s in our incentive, as well as the merchant’s incentive, for us to help customers get the full store delivered to them." Google To Start Trial of Fresh Food Deliveries To Two US Cities [bloomberg.com]

[Robert Charlton]

I'm extremely curious to see how this venture does. It brings to mind Webvan, the SF Bay Area operation that pioneered a lot of the workflow that I suspect is still applicable to the web-to-home delivery business, and which, at the time, around the year 2000, I thought was a very impressive operation with a great future.

I informally shared space in one of the photo studios that was used for Webvan's food photography, and the early applications of electronically monitored workflow to produce web catalogue images and product data for the website simply knocked me out.

(Afterwards, there was an extra perk... we also dined on many gourmet-level meals of the photographed food, prepared by the studio kitchen chef, made from Whole Foods quality ingredients).

This article, which I just came across, takes a look at the scope of the innovative delivery chain....

Webvan: Rewriting The Rules On 'Last Mile' Delivery
August 01, 2000
[supplychainbrain.com...]

The result is a marketplace first: self-scheduled, personalized home delivery within guaranteed 30-minute windows.

This, from a much more recent TechCrunch article, looks at Webvan's failure from a business perspective. They got their target market wrong....

Where Webvan Failed And How Home Delivery 2.0 Could Succeed
Posted Sep 27, 2013
[techcrunch.com...]

This is all prior to Google and Amazon testing the home delivery waters, with Whole Foods now one of the partners.