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.”