Grocers Gear Up for Holiday Season By Implementing E-Catering
More grocers are turning to catering software provider FoodStorm as they get ready for an increased number of consumers gathering together this holiday season. Five additional food retailers — Straub's Fine Grocers in Missouri, Midtowne Market in Missouri, Sunset Foods in Illinois, Joseph's Classic Market in Florida, and Town & Country Markets in California — have signed on to use the company's SaaS offering to manage their catering and prepared food offerings and create an instant e-commerce presence for these offerings.
“Across the board, the grocers we’ve talked with are anticipating a very busy holiday season with higher catering and prepared food volumes than ever before,” said Rob Hill, CEO of New York-based FoodStorm. “So they are taking proactive steps to ensure they have the right infrastructure in place to handle that volume. We have been deluged with inbound requests from grocers across the U.S., and are very excited to be kicking off engagements with these new customers in August and September.”
According to eMarketer, in 2020 grocery e-commerce sales increased by 54%. In 2021, they are expected to grow another 17.8% and comprise 12.4% of all grocery sales. After implementing FoodStorm, grocers have reported that more than half of their orders are placed online, and more than half of those are placed from mobile devices.
FoodStorm’s SaaS offering covers multichannel ordering (e-commerce, phone or in-store kiosk); order management; payment; and fulfillment, and integrates easily with a large variety of third-party systems, including point of sale. The software provides a catering-specific e-commerce website to match the grocer’s brand, order and production management, PCI-compliant payment processing, CRM tools to market and grow their business, and reporting features with a live business dashboard.
“Manually orchestrating catering and prepared food orders was a big burden for our team — FoodStorm will enable us to accommodate a much higher volume of orders with the same number of staff,” said Trip Straub, president and CEO of Clayton, Mo.-based Straub’s Fine Grocers. “We’re also excited to boost our e-commerce presence, as we know it will help us better compete with other grocers, pure online options and even local restaurants.”
FoodStorm is in use at thousands of sites around the world, processing more than $1.5 billion in catering and prepared food orders for grocers, caterers and corporate dining operations. In late July, the company revealed that it had signed eight new U.S. grocery customers, demonstrating the momentum it has in the United States.
