Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 7, 1995 TAG: 9507070046
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CAMBRIDGE, MASS. LENGTH: Medium
- You can't thump the melons or heft the iceberg lettuce. But there are no wobbly shopping carts and no lines at the checkout counter.
Grocery shopping by computer has arrived.
A new online store on the Internet offers shopping at the push of a button, plus delivery.
``We can order whatever we want. The food is actually cheaper than the grocery store,'' said Paul Martin, who has been using his laptop to shop at the Smart Food Co-Op since February.
The store is the brainchild of two Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates, Chon Vo and Alex Sherstinsky. The two buy the goods from their own suppliers and sell them at a small markup.
Customers get their groceries delivered the day after ordering and pay cash on the spot.
Vo, who owns an Asian restaurant in Cambridge, started a small-scale, online grocery store in 1990. Sherstinsky broadened it with dazzling software in the past year.
So far, the store has been limited to 400 customers, all of whom attend MIT or live in Cambridge. Next week, service will be expanded to customers living west of Boston.
The pair eventually hope to hire delivery services to expand their grocery in Massachusetts and nationwide. Sherstinsky, now an MIT graduate student, was in California on Thursday negotiating with stores in Berkeley.
``You have practically everything on the Internet right now. Why not food?'' Vo said. ``Young professional students, who've been most of our customers, can still go to the supermarket, but the elderly or handicapped people have a tougher time, so this should be great for them.''
Users can:
Browse and choose, for example, between bananas designated ``ripe,'' ``near ripe'' or ``green.''
Place their items in a computerized basket and keep a running tally of their bill.
Point and click on the entry ``broccoli'' and not only get nutritional information about broccoli but also recipes containing the vegetable.
Register their likes or dislikes in the Smart Food computer system. One customer is a vegetarian who likes only organic vegetables. Another likes his milk in cardboard containers, not plastic.
Vo delivers the orders by van, using a computer program to map out the most efficient route.
Martin, an MIT graduate student, said he and his wife like using Smart Food because they're busy with an 8-week-old baby.
``Many of the things are brand names, so I've seen them in the past,'' he said. ``With the produce, they have it set up so if you don't like something, you give it back. That's what I call service.''
The Internet address for the Smart Food Co-Op is: http://thinkpix.com/sfc/ on the World Wide Web.
by CNB