At the beginning of April, Emma Snyder, a Boston-based UX researcher, became one of the 1,300 or so employees laid off from restaurant management platform Toast. She had been with the company since late 2016, making her one of the unicorn startup's earlier employees.
Elsewhere in the city, product designer Ethan Pierce was staring down the specter of unemployment as well. He had been working as a product consultant with the 2020 class of Techstars Boston. A handful of participating startups had courted him as a potential head of product, he said, but when it became clear that the funding environment had changed, those offers disappeared.
"It got as far as the contract was on the table, and then Covid hit," Pierce said. "The two of us found ourselves facing very near-term joblessness. We decided, 'Hey, this isn't a great time to be on the job market in tech in Boston. So let's try and do something—even if it's just a short-term social project—to help and leverage our backgrounds and much as we can.'"
Using their own technical skills as well as Snyder's in-depth knowledge of the restaurant industry, Snyder and Pierce launched Grocery Outpost last month. The project allows restaurants to essentially get set up as temporary grocery stores. Customers can order food products from restaurant wholesalers via Grocery Outpost's online platform, choosing from a number of pre-made bundles. The food is then delivered via the restaurants themselves.
The model is designed to solve a handful of problems. Restaurants in Massachusetts are not yet allowed to open for dine-in eating and have consequently seen a precipitous drop in sales, as much as 90 percent, Pierce said. At the same time, wholesale suppliers that sell food directly to restaurants also have nowhere to sell to, leading to food waste—while restaurants' refrigerators and freezers sit empty.
"I thought, 'There's got to be a way to leverage all that cold storage space for the restaurants and their suppliers to distribute food at a hyperlocal level,'" Pierce said. "We'd solve these twin problems of the supply chain being interrupted and the restaurants being closed."
Pierce and Snyder got Grocery Outpost's landing page live on April 19. By the week of May 4, the two were able to launch pilots at their first two restaurant "outposts": Juliet in Somerville's Union Square neighborhood and Peregrine in Beacon Hill.
That week, both restaurants sold out completely. Grocery Outpost has since increased the order volume at Juliet and Peregrine and is beginning to onboard more restaurants. Over the weekend, Grendel's Den in Harvard Square became the project's third outpost. About 15 restaurants were on the waiting list as of Friday last week, Pierce said; Harvard Gardens in Beacon Hill and Union Street in Newton will open next.
Grocery Outpost filled orders from about 20 households in its first week and about 60 in its second week. Pierce said he intends to continue tripling order volume week over week. Grocery Outpost pays wholesaler suppliers directly, and restaurants get a 20 percent commission fee for filling each order.
Grocery Outpost has launched a secondary volunteer effort as well, a campaign called #FilltheFridge. The startup is donating all of the proceeds from its Groceries Essentials Bundles to purchase and deliver groceries to food-insecure homes in Cambridge and Somerville.
Neither Pierce nor Snyder is taking a paycheck, nor are any of the volunteers who have helped get the project set up. But they also aren't looking for other work at the moment.
"For us right now, it's a full-time endeavor," Pierce said. "Our first goal is to try and help as many restaurants as we can. We'll figure out whether this is something that could help sustain restaurants long-term, create a secondary revenue stream for restaurants and become a business, but I think we're happy even if this is a shorter-term Covid-19 project."
