How COVID-19 Has Changed Grocery Shopping

This story originally appeared on the BBC. READ THE STORY HERE.

Late March saw long queues outside supermarkets as anxious shoppers waited to stockpile supplies. Three months on the queues are still there; now shoppers, two metres apart and with pockets full of hand sanitiser, are lining up for a socially-distanced visit to the store.

Enter Canadian start-up Grocery Neighbour. The company believes it has come up with a potential solution to the grocery store conundrum: a mobile supermarket in a semi-open-air truck that shoppers can step aboard to grab essentials while maintaining social distancing measures.

“Things are changing, the world is chaotic and with that comes opportunity,” says Frank Sinopoli, the company’s 37-year-old founder and CEO, who came up with the idea as businesses began understanding the day-to-day repercussions of Covid-19.

The concept of a supermarket-on-wheels isn’t entirely new: companies in the US states of Oklahoma and California, for example, have rolled out services delivering fresh produce to food deserts and connecting local farmers with their communities respectively. Sinopoli hopes his will be the tailor-made solution for the coronavirus era, yet experts suggest these types of businesses will need to pinpoint their niche in the market to compete with the surge in online food delivery.

'Floating carts’

Sinopoli says his 53-foot-long trucks are custom-built for Covid-19, with sanitising and social distancing front and centre. “It will be like a bus route,” he explains, with trucks following specific routes and schedules. An app will notify residents when the truck (each staffed with a worker and a driver) is stopping nearby.

The truck will be open at both ends. "You'll be walking through a tunnel,” he explains; shoppers will enter from the back and exit through the front. Sinopoli wants a maximum of five customers on board at a time, spending five minutes each in the vehicle, which is laid out like a single aisle in a grocery store, offering meats, cheeses, produce and some dried goods.

Each customer will push a trolley that folds out of the wall, runs (or “floats,” as Sinopoli says) along a track down the aisle, and then folds back into the wall to be immediately sanitised once the customer reaches the till. It serves as a built-in social distancing measure: “There’s a ‘floating’ grocery cart in front of you and behind you, people can't touch you even if they want to,” Sinopoli says.

The first mobile units are planned to be released this month: three in the Greater Toronto Area, two in the United States (no word yet on which specific cities) and five more in Canada, mostly in the suburbs. Sinopoli is aiming for “1,000 trucks to be on the road within the next two years”, and anticipates pricing matching traditional brick-and-mortar shops.

"Based on the demand that we've received, we're [targeting] the demographic that loves convenience," he says. "We originally thought specific groups would appreciate and/or benefit from the service, like the elderly, food deserts and family neighbourhoods. But the data says it's nearly everyone who has shown interest.”

‘Who’s your customer?’

Yet retail experts wonder how new grocery alternatives like these will perform in an already saturated grocery market. Apps like UberEats, Instacart and Amazon Prime have made it possible to get groceries shipped straight to your door, while many restaurants have beefed up delivery services during Covid-19.

Newcomers to the space “have to figure out who their target customer is”, says Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. With Grocery Neighbour, “their cost of customer acquisition is going to be more than Amazon because they have this very clear physical presence and not the volume yet”. While bricks-and-mortar shops won’t go away, Aulet believes even greater importance will be placed on online businesses moving forward, rendering Grocery Neighbour almost unnecessary when measured against online delivery services.

Still, blending elements of a traditional shop with digital technology, safety and convenience could create a unique niche in the market. “Maybe the answer is: you can touch and feel a product without having to actually go to a traditional, [crowded] store,” says Anindya Ghose, a professor of business at New York University. “All [Grocery Neighbour] needs to do is figure out one hook that is really appealing to consumers where it’s no longer a want but a need.”

Dr Richard Kennedy, co-director of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic, one of the largest medical research institutes in the US, says given the open-air set-up, shopping at such trucks would be “less risky [than] an enclosed space” (though he stresses the importance of wearing masks while perusing stock).

Ghose believes this could attract a particular demographic. “In the post-Covid world, we will still have to continue practicing social distancing, mask-wearing and all,” he says. “Going to a supermarket is still going to be risky, so Grocery Neighbour may appeal to those that don’t want to incur that issue.

The service could also appeal to those who depend on public transport to get to supermarkets, don’t want to wait in long queues with their fellow shoppers and even those seeking a blast from the past. “If you go back 30 years, most people bought groceries not by going to a physical store and not through e-commerce but by going to these small providers in open carts” on the street, Ghose says. “This reminds me of that but in a more sophisticated way. This is a hybrid: it’s not a regular offline pursuit and it’s not ecommerce. It’s something in the middle.”

Whether Grocery Neighbour will find its niche remains to be seen, but it’s an example of the way the pandemic is driving innovation, from medical research to working practices all the way to how we board a plane.

“What’s happening now is that the deck has been thrown up in the air so there are lots of opportunities for [new inventions],” says Aulet of MIT. “When people change their habits, that’s when opportunities arise.”