Mercato Online Delivery Platform Offers Ease and Customer Service
By Lorrie Baumann
Mercato was one of the vendors who set up shop in the NGA Show‘s technology pavilion this year, and Bobby Brannigan, the company’s Chief Executive Officer, found a ready reception from independent grocers who wanted to know how his technology platform could help them extend the same friendly service that brings shoppers into their brick and mortar stores to neighbors who want to reach their stores through online channels. He was just as eager to oblige.
“Our mission is to match in-store experience with the same personal connection,” he said. “We’ve built something that would be really hard for independent marketers to do, but we have more than 20 years of Internet marketing experience.”
Brannigan grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where his family operated B&A Pork Store, an Italian grocery. “I grew up working there, and as a kid, I delivered groceries,” he said.
After learning something about how to make a living as a neighborhood grocer, he went off to college and then built a college textbook company. After he sold that, he decided to come back home to the grocery business, where his dad was still doing business without any of the modern technology that Brannigan had used to help him build the business he’d just sold.
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Brannigan couldn’t find anything on the market that could help his father as an independent grocer, so he decided to build his own platform, first for his dad, and then for other independent grocers. The Mercato platform allows individual grocery stores to offer everything that’s in their store to online shoppers and to offer delivery services to any customer within 16 miles of their brick-and-mortar store. Working solely with independent, family-owned grocers, Mercato is already operating nationwide, with its strongest markets including New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and more than 10,000 delivery couriers already organized in all 50 states around the country to pick up customer orders from the neighborhood grocers as they come in through the stores’ online portals and deliver them directly to shoppers’ homes. That makes it possible for you as a neighborhood grocer who gets a weekly order from Mrs. Goldfarb, who’s been shopping with your store for decades and who’s extremely picky about her corned beef and the freshness of her chickens to get the same service she’d get from your meat department when she shows up in person, according to Brannigan. “When they deliver, everything comes from your store,” he said. “Your meat guy is packing the order.”
“We have an extraordinary group of personal chefs who order hard-to-find ingredients on our platform,” he added. “High-quality fresh products and hard-to-find ingredients are a sweet spot for us.”
When a grocer joins Mercato, the company builds a web page for the store on the Mercato platform. That’s integrated with the grocer’s existing point of sale equipment. The platform organizes the data for the SKUs that are already on the grocer’s shelves from a database that already includes more than 600,000 possible products. If a grocer carries a product like that special salad that Mrs. Goldfarb always likes that isn’t already in the system, that’s added into the database. “Creating a new product is as easy as posting on Instagram,” Brannigan said.
Within a couple of days, the grocer is ready to start selling to the online customers who find the store’s new website through marketing that happens both in-store where Mrs. Goldfarb can see it and in cyberspace, where Mrs. Goldfarb’s daughter can see it when she needs to order her mom’s groceries for her. Mercato charges a set-up fee of a few thousand dollars and a POS integration fee of a few hundred dollars, and after that, Mercato collects a commission on sales, but there are no ongoing software fees. “We can handle pretty much any POS integration,” Brannigan said. “We only make money if they make money.”
Bellucci EVOO: Harvesting Excellence
The morning hours are crisp, and the soft, rolling breeze is accompanied by the strong, rich scent of olives. The time has come to harvest – and Bellucci’s farmers are steadfastly preparing to take to the trees.
In order to produce the finest authentic Italian extra virgin olive oil, the olives must be harvested before the first frost. While the timing of harvest is not an exact science, the quality of the olive oil produced depends on its precision. In fact, the taste, color, nutrient level and overall vitality of extra virgin olive oil is drastically affected by when it is harvested.
The trees are inspected to ensure their olive fruits have reached the perfect level of maturity. Firm, bright green fruits produce a verdant, grassy flavor with a strong bite and high antioxidant content. These fruits must undergo a longer milling process in order to extract the oil, which may have a bitter, pungent flavor profile. Soft, dark fruits produce copious amounts of yellow-gold oil. This oil is sweet and fruity with a mellow flavor profile – though it has reduced amounts of chlorophyll and beneficial polyphenols.
The ideal olive is found between these two stages, in the veraison phase. Veraison is a term borrowed from French viticulture, which refers to the change of color found in ripening grapes. In olives, this appears as a yellow-green softening of the fruit, touched by the first blush of red or purple. Veraison fruits are the peak of perfection, and will produce an ample quantity of rich, verdant gold oil; dense in nutrients, and with a well-rounded flavor profile.
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The crates are carefully labelled, entered into the Bellucci traceability system, and then transported to the millhouse, where the olives will be washed, pressed, ground and spun in a centrifuge. After this journey, it will undergo rigorous testing and verification before it can be labelled as extra virgin olive oil. It will then receive the mark of Bureau Veritas, which certifies its purity, authenticity and place of origin, before undergoing the journey to the shelves of grocers everywhere.
Second only to the perfect timing of harvest is Bellucci’s dedication to ensuring freshness and purity. This means seeing that the olives are pressed into oil within hours of harvest, and that each bottle of Bellucci is transported from tree to table with the utmost care. This dedication has landed Bellucci at the forefront of the extra virgin olive oil industry when it comes to matters of traceability and transparency. The company’s Trust Through Traceability program supplies each bottle with a unique code which allows consumers to trace it back to the source, increasing visibility and trust.
A new partnership with tech leader Oracle is helping take traceability to a whole new level, bringing even deeper insight into the production of authentic extra virgin olive oil. The additional development will allow blockchain technology to create an unalterable ledger which documents each step of the journey between grove and grocer.
Domaine Carneros Recognized for Green Business
Domaine Carneros, a family-owned winery committed to handcrafting ultra-premium sparkling and pinot noir wines from hand-harvested, estate grown grapes, has been named a California Green Medal recipient for the fifth annual Sustainable Winegrowing Leadership Awards. As the recipient of the 2019 California Green Medal Business Award, Domaine Carneros was recognized for demonstrating “Smart Business through efficiencies, cost savings and innovation from implementing sustainable practices.”
Since 1987, sustainability has been a main business practice employed by Domaine Carneros, instituted by Chief Executive Officer Eileen Crane, who has been with the winery since inception. Crane recognized that for philosophical as well as economic reasons, sustainability made sense as a tenet of doing business. Her open book management plan sets measurable goals every three years and reevaluates on an annual basis, ensuring employee involvement in managing the sustainability category as part of the winery’s culture.
“Domaine Carneros’ smart business sense and commitment to sustainability has been apparent in every facet of their operation, with both vineyards and the winery comprehensively certified to Certified California Sustainable Winegrowing (CERTIFIED SUSTAINABLE) and the Napa Green Land and Winery programs,” noted the award announcement.
Domaine Carneros has placed a high priority on living as lightly on the land as possible. One practice credited for earning the Green Medal Business recognition was the packaging reuse program, whereby cases and inserts are re-used for in-house purposes, which amounts to about a 20 to 25 percent reuse rate each year. This alone has saved the company an average of $75,000 per year since the program began in 2011.
In addition to the packaging reuse program, the company installed the largest solar collection system of any winery in the world at the time in 2003 (the system captured enough electricity to power 230 homes for a year in 2017 when the data was last measured). Utilizing skylights to reduce the need for electricity, building into the earth and using night cooling systems to maintain cellar temperatures, have all contributed to further energy conservation.
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Since 2013, Domaine Carneros has been CERTIFIED SUSTAINABLE. An annually renewed certification, CERTIFIED SUSTAINABLE vineyards and wineries produce high quality grapes and wine, protect and preserve the environment and enhance the community economically and culturally.
The company culture of sustainability extends beyond the walls of the winery as well. Since the late 1980s, Domaine Carneros has farmed sustainably, from using owl boxes as a natural solution for rodent management to using grape pomace from the harvest to feed local cattle.
An enduring focus on water conservation has led the winery to incorporate low flow toilets and employ reclamation systems through its properties. These are also some of the practices that led Domaine Carneros to be Fish Friendly Farming certified in 2015. Fish Friendly Farming is a certification program for agricultural properties managed to restore fish and wildlife habitat and improve water quality. The certification is renewed yearly.
In addition to these viticultural practices, Domaine Carneros follows vegan practices, using no animal-derived products at any point in the process, from growing the grapes to the winemaking.
