A local developer is partnering with a Vancouver-based online grocery delivery company to make home grocery delivery more attractive for Vancouver condominium owners.
The home-delivery niche has been much-hyped yet remains a tiny part of the overall grocery market in part because of buyers’ fears that their plastic bin of groceries will either be so warm that the vegetables will wilt or that they will be stolen by neighbours.
To ease those fears, Bosa Properties has built what it calls a “BosaFresh” facility – a 200-square-foot, temperature-controlled storage room at its Lido development in southeast False Creek.
“We’re programming BosaFresh into all our new buildings at this point,” Bosa’s senior vice-president Daryl Simpson told Business in Vancouver May 7.
“We’re not changing the world by doing this but we are making some people’s lives easier so we intend to do it in future projects.”
Only residents who are registered in a program to get Sustainable Produce Urban Delivery (SPUD) to deliver groceries to their building will have their key fobs programmed to be able to access to the room, Simpson said.
There will also be a camera in the room to ensure neighbours do not snatch carrots or leeks.
Bosa’s partnership with SPUD comes consumers get increasingly used to buying items online.
The room will be kept at a cool temperature and will have enough space for 30 grocery deliveries each day.
SPUD CEO Peter Van Stolk told BIV that SPUD’s commitment to the program did not come as part of a financial contribution nor discounts to home owners.
Instead, SPUD will boost its number of deliveries to the building to daily from weekly, as it is in most parts of Metro Vancouver.
Van Stolk may be best known for being the creative genius that turned a small juice company named Jones Soda Co. into a venture that had a US$900 million market capitalization on the Nasdaq in 2006.
Jones Soda has since fizzled but Van Stolk bought SPUD in 2010 along with partners and has continued to expand the company so that it now delivers food in metro areas of cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver and Calgary as well as on Vancouver Island.
SPUD keeps expanding and it closed a deal last week to buy Vancouver meal-delivery company Licious Living, which also operates four cafés.
“We’re up to 350 employees and we’re growing like crazy,” Van Stolk told BIV May 7.
