HOME RUN: THE GROCERY PLATFORM EMPOWERING SUPERMARKETS TO TAKE ON AMAZON WITH 60 MINUTE DELIVERIES FROM ALL YOUR FAVOURITE STORES

Home Run, the one-hour grocery delivery platform, today announces aggressive expansion plans to combat Amazon with funding through equity crowdfunding platform Seedrs. The tech startup is on a mission to ensure all online grocery customers receive the fastest and most efficient service through its exciting new B2B proposition, “Powered by Home Run”.

Home Run is the brainchild of three Warwick University students, who carried out research and concluded that online grocery shopping should be much better. At the start, the founders trialed a variety of different click-and-collect, home delivery and pricing schemes, and even delivered over 1000 orders themselves on a bicycle trailer, before deciding on Home Run’s final business model.

Today, Home Run is already working with some of the UK’s leading supermarkets such as Waitrose and Tesco. Customers can select their preferred store and place an order for same day delivery within as little as 60 minutes. Home Run’s contracted personal shoppers pick the groceries physically from within store and use its custom-built shopping app to guide them through shopping the order, managing replacements as well as communicating with customers. Orders are then delivered by drivers, also contracted, using an app that ensures the most efficient route.

Unlike other online grocers, Home Run holds no warehouses, inventory or delivery vehicles of its own. Because of this, it has a unique model which enables the grocery retailers like Marks and Spencer to provide their customers with one-hour delivery at a very minimal cost to themselves. With online groceries making up just 6.7% of the entire UK grocery market[1], many retailers are still wholly dependent on their physical stores. Home Run is using these stores as its own ready-made fulfillment centres. The model is therefore highly scalable and quick to roll out. Wherever there is a supermarket, there could also be Home Run.

“Powered by Home Run”, the new white label offering, takes this concept even further towards empowering and uniting grocers in the fight against retail giant Amazon.

Since the global e-commerce company bought Whole Foods in America in 2017, it has been clear that Amazon is going after the grocery market. Amazon is fast, innovative and owns the customer in almost every retail category. Home Run wants to make sure this is not the case with groceries. The goal is to unify the online grocery market with a model that centers around assets that Amazon does not have but the grocery market has in abundance: physical stores.

Home Run has spent the last few years developing its own extensive suite of proprietary technology which supports the entire customer journey as well as fulfillment operations.  The company is licensing its technology as well as its operations as a low-cost, high quality product; “Powered by Home Run”. The offering will support any European grocer that wants to, with minimal capital expenditure, advance or indeed launch from scratch their own profitable online grocery offering. Now, these retailerscan give their customers the same excellent service using Home Run’s infrastructure, but under their own brand.

Home Run is not just grocery delivery, it is personal grocery shopping. Customers can communicate with their personal shopper via the app and can leave notes for their personal shopper at the time of placing an order. Gone are the days of scheduling your life around expensive and long-awaited delivery slots; no more hours wasted wandering up and down the same supermarket isles and, thanks to its sophisticated replacement system, which allows you to choose potential replacement items before checkout, no more surprise replacements at the door.

Adam Balon, partner at JamJar Investments and co-founder of innocent drinks] commented: “One of the key things that we loved about Home Run is that it offers one- hour grocery delivery and that’s something I, and lots of people, want. The UK grocery market is changing quickly, we’ve gone through the first wave of online where people place their order for the next day or the day after, but the cutting edge of the market is moving towards ‘give me my groceries in the next hour’. Grocers need to move that way, but they are not yet set up to do so, and that’s where Home Run can come in and help retailers give consumers what they want.”

Takis Malavetas, Co-Founder and CEO at Home Run said: “50% of the UK’s customers would like to do their grocery shopping online, but only 5% actually do[2]. This is because the current online grocery offering is too slow, too restrictive, and unprofitable, it does not yet suit customer demands. In order to address this need, Home Run has developed a platform that executes our vision of how grocery shopping should be in the 21st century. We are excited to welcome investors on our journey as we take Home Run into its next phase of development.”