Oakland, CA – What’s the story coming out of Shotput now?
The main problem of food deserts comes down to affordability and deliverability of food. Most companies service key shopping districts where they can maximize their revenue / square foot. Praful Mathur, Shotput Co-Founder and CEO, started looking into this problem deeply as he lives in Oakland and was frustrated with his own limited options. Furthermore, companies like Instacart and Amazon Fresh were far too expensive, which left him often having to spend time taking a Lyft or Uber to nearby grocery stores or ordering out every night.
Since he ran a logistics and supply chain company servicing companies like Dow Jones and Red Bull, he started to develop a model that could work even in his community to help him and his neighbors get food delivered cheaper than they could buy in stores. He also realized that the model would be able to scale to other communities that also struggle with getting healthy food.
Shotput set up partnerships with existing platforms like UberEATS, Postmates, and Caviar to deliver high quality groceries for low prices. The first goal is to get the convenience part of convenience store down. Right now, Shotput carries a range of juices, salads, poke offerings, coffees, teas, and nut milks—that is, the really fresh, healthy foods that are highly perishable. This service has been growing 30% week over week.
The next step will be setting up pick-up points so that people can order groceries while at work and then pick them up at designated places directly on their commute—train stations, parking lots, etc. Costs will go down even further, and Shotput will be releasing an app to facilitate this process.
The final step will be to set up automated grocery stores in office parks, train stations, and parking lots. This will likely occur by the end of the year. Shotput is targeting these stores to be 30% cheaper than Safeway. Shotput is keeping the supply chain tight so they can provide free deliveries at lower costs to customers at convenient locations where they'll already be such as work and train stations. The goal is to provide prepackaged products to customers such as meal kits, raw juices, cold brew coffees, kombucha, and teas that are sourced with sustainable production methods from farmers that care about the effect of their crop on peoples' health. Shotput has full transparency in the food chain across the board through their ability to connect customers to the full chain on our app.
Shotput is piloting its mission in Oakland to create the first robotic grocery store, if you will. The plan will expand up the supply chain, leveraging AI and robotics to create grocery delivery services that are not only more accessible, but cheaper than grocery stores. Shotput hopes to open automated grocery stores across the United States to combat the food desert problem.
You can see a demonstration of Shotput's supply chain technology here.
What is Shotput’s core technology?
Shotput is developing advanced supply chain solutions using AI and robotics. Until recently, this meant focusing on retail fulfillment—helping small and medium-scale manufacturers compete with e-commerce giants by building a set of APIs to track and organize all supply chain operations from post-manufacturing to delivery. One outgrowth of this mission is our work on robotic shipping containers, which can track and move packages around in transit, no matter where they are en route.
How did Shotput end up working in the food delivery space?
Our friends from YC, at Assembly, were beginning to enter the fulfillment space, and we didn’t want to compete with each other. So the idea came up: how can we work together? And ultimately, we took that entire block of our company, packaged it as Shotput Logistics, and sold it to them—lean supply chains as a service.
This left us with a lot of capital to work with, and allowed us to pursue the opportunity we’d been eyeing for awhile in food and bev, which is a very, very high-growth business for fulfillment companies. No company in the food and beverage business can do CPG e-commerce effectively in the market, plain and simple. The manufacturers of Coke, Red Bull, juices, coffees will only deliver to retailers, who are notoriously slow to adopt new products.
What we’ve started to do is go to these food and bev companies, show them our nationwide e-commerce capabilities, rooted in really strong supply chain technology, and tell them, “We’ll handle it for you.” In effect, using UberEATS (which is just the start), we become these companies’ virtual storefront, where all their e-commerce orders and deliveries happen.
What are some of the problems Shotput is hoping to tackle in the medium term?
We want to align our strengths—building e-commerce software and robotic supply chain technology—with major food and beverage companies’ desire to work with regionally-focused marketplaces. We have the capability to built a robotic fulfillment system that can scale nationwide, which you interact with through our electronic storefront—something we’re starting with on UberEATS in the Bay Area, with other markets coming soon.
Another key benefit of bringing state-of-the-art supply chain technology to the food delivery space, especially on a platform as widely used as Uber, is that we can sell fresh foods from national suppliers at a lower cost than UberEATS’ fixed-location stores, which can only supply a certain geographical range. Hopefully, as has happened in areas where public transportation is lacking, Shotput can help UberEATS expand its options in places historically labeled food deserts, giving people healthier, fresher options than McDonalds at a reasonable cost.
Do you have any notable partners or funders?
Y Combinator and Justin Kan.
Media
https://www.youtube.com/embed/ohmwU1aUUbg
Select Frames: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/0B_9RBrgnVOXtVnVqVmVmTnp5ajA
About Shotput
Shotput Corner Store is a fully automated grocery store that brings the convenience of shopping to the consumer. By setting up stores in office parks, train stations, and farmers' market locations, consumers can easily shop for their favorite foods on their phone and pick up at convenient locations.
Source: Shotput