There’s an emerging trend of online services that do your grocery shopping for you, and one of the companies, Honestbee, has raised a total of US$15 million in its first round of funding.
They are backed by an impressive line-up of Silicon Valley bigwigs, such as investment firm Formation 8 (a backer of Oculus VR), with Pejman Mar Ventures (investor of Dropbox and the Lending Club), as well as Gideon Yu (former CFO of Facebook), Owen Van Natta (one of the founding member’s of Amazon’s search company A9) and Steve Chen, the advisor for Google Ventures.
At Honestbee, all you have to do is to key in your postal code on the main site, and a list of supermarket options will come up. Select a retail outlet and your groceries, which will arrive within an hour. Customers can also choose their preferred delivery timings.
However, the company faces competition from other sites like RedMart, a service that delivers within two hours to seven days, Go Fresh, which prides itself on being able to deliver fresh gourmet seafood to customers. Another fresh online grocer, Purely Fresh, has an array of meats, fruits, vegetables, seafood and even Yong Tau Foo ingredients.
And, if you’re looking for a nifty way to make money on the side, check out this story in The New Paper that features a man who earns about $4,000 a month doing grocery shopping for people.
