Online grocery delivery start-up Weee! encourages customers to share videos of recipes and favorite items on its app. It specializes in hard-to-find Asian food, along with fruits, vegetables, and other staples.
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Online grocery company Weee specializes in hard-to-find foods from Asian and Spanish cuisines. Earlier this year, it got a different kind of rarity: a big Hollywood name in its executive suite.
The company hired Jon M. Chu, director of “Crazy Rich Asians” and the film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights,” as chief creative officer. Chu brings his expertise in storytelling from the movies, where food and culture play a central role, to an in-house team of approximately 10 people who showcase unique dishes and the ingredients needed to create them – sold on the ever-expanding Weee online platform.
Chu said he envisions bringing unconventional features to the online grocer, such as playlists of songs that customers can listen to while cooking or a follow-up email they could receive about the history of items they’ve purchased. .
“For me, this was more important than just a job for a start-up,” he said. “This was about my stories taking on a new shape.”
Weee sells more than 10,000 products, from kitchen-specific items like kimchi and frozen shrimp dumplings to staples like milk, bananas and chicken breasts. Shoppers can browse the company’s website and app in a variety of languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean or Spanish. The app also allows shoppers to pick up at more than 1,000 restaurants.
The San Francisco Bay Area-based start-up now supplies fresh groceries to 18 states and shelf-stable produce to all lower 48 states. It has eight fulfillment centers across the country, including from Washington to New Jersey, where orders are packed and shipped.
The company is trying to stand out in a fragmented space — and give a taste of what online grocery shopping could look like in the future. The grocer’s app and website shake up the typical online grocery shopping experience to make it more sociable and immersive.
Weee encourages customers to upload videos of recipes and favorite dishes to its app through a TikTok-like feature. Shoppers can purchase snacks and ingredients from those videos at the click of a button. They get discounts when they refer a friend or family member and can share custom coupons for the items they recently purchased.
“We just believe that grocery shopping shouldn’t be like we see today,” said founder and CEO Larry Liu. “It should be much, much better, much, much more inspiring and fun.”
Changing taste
In the past two years, consumers have embraced new ways to fill refrigerators and developed a bigger palate while cooking more at home. That inspired some to try meal packs, get groceries delivered to their door, or use takeout.
The Covid pandemic fueled growth for Weee. The privately owned, venture-backed start-up refused to share its total customers and revenues, but said it has fulfilled more than 15 million orders to date. Monthly active users have grown more than 150% year over year. To date, the start-up has raised more than $800 million in funding — including a $425 million investment round announced in February led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
The pandemic also catalyzed the US online grocery market, which accounts for a small but growing fraction of the industry’s total sales. According to IRI E-Market Insights and Coresight Research, online food sales nearly doubled from $29.3 billion in 2019 to $57 billion in 2020. The company estimates that online food sales in the country will reach nearly $90 billion this year. amounts. Yet the physical category still dominates the supermarket category, with a staggering 95% of food retail spending in 2021, according to Coresight’s research.
Online supermarket chains don’t have sample stations, colorful displays and other experiences that draw people to stores and make quick purchases, said Ken Fenyo, president of research and consulting at Coresight Research.
In stores, customers can “sniff the fruit. You can walk down the aisles and see if there’s anything new you want. You might have that serendipity of ‘Oh, I forgot I needed that. Let me throw it in.’ ‘” he said. “Online is usually much more search-driven, much more list-driven.”
Retailers like Weee can reinvigorate experiential elements in grocery shopping to make e-commerce more exciting and personal, Fenyo said. Other direct-to-consumer grocers have developed specialties such as Thrive Market, which sells organic and natural foods, or Misfits Market and Imperfect Foods, which sell high-quality groceries for less through misshapen fruits and vegetables, crushed almonds, or Equivalent products.
The challenge for Weee and other smaller online grocery players is winning new customers, keeping delivery costs low and fighting off traditional grocers from invading their premises, Fenyo said.
Larry Liu, a Chinese immigrant, started Weee! because of his own struggle to find favorite foods.
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The Story of an Immigrant
For Liu, 41, the challenges that inspired Weee were personal.
Liu, a first-generation Chinese immigrant, founded the company in 2015 after struggling to find his own favorite foods. He grew tired of the hour and a half drive to his nearest Asian market and became inspired by seeing WeChat groups hosted by others who lacked the taste of home. In one, a woman coordinated a group order for friends — and friends of friends — who wanted to buy fresh cod from California’s Half Moon Bay.
That experience later shaped some of the Weee app’s distinctive features, such as a “Community” tab that resembles a social media network with a mix of company-generated and user-generated videos.
Weee is targeting customers living in communities that don’t have the density to support a large Asian market like an H Mart, from international students attending college in the United States to seniors living in assisted living facilities, it said. Liu. Most customers order more than twice a month, and Weee makes up about 40% to 50% of their monthly grocery budget, he said.
Weee is also gradually adding Spanish foods. It offers a category of Mexican food in California and Texas.
Popular items include everyday staples such as rice and fresh vegetables, along with seasonal items such as sweet winter melon from Vietnam, hot pot kits from southern China, and sesame cake from northern China during the Lunar New Year.
The app also features a rotating list of suggestions, such as Japanese snacks to celebrate “sakura,” or cherry blossom, season, or treats for Mother’s Day. It also offers a growing range of beauty and household items, such as Korean cosmetics.
Jon M. Chu attends Disney’s premiere of “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” held at the El Capitan Theater on August 16, 2021 in Los Angeles, California.
Axelle | Bauer Griffin | Movie Magic | Getty Images
A new kind of storytelling
Before hiring film director Chu, Weee had seen the company’s vans, heard about the company from friends, and started getting deliveries as a customer of Korean barbecue ingredients like sauce and short ribs. Intrigued by the company and its mission, he contacted Liu. Their conversations led to a job offer.
Chu will soon begin directing Universal Pictures’ adaptation of the Broadway hit “Wicked” starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. Despite the big project, he said he wanted to make room in his schedule for Weee.
As a child, Chu often did his homework at the bar of Chef Chu’s, the family restaurant his parents have owned in the San Francisco Bay Area for some 50 years. The restaurant is featured in a video about Weee’s goal to connect generations and cultures through food.
Now that he is a father himself, Chu said he wants to help his three young children learn their culture.
“I wanted them to smoke Asian food, [to feel] that it wasn’t exotic or weird to them,” he said. “That it was home to them as it was to me.”
Chu recently took advantage of his Rolodex of Hollywood connections, teaming up with Disney and Pixar to develop recipes and shoot videos for the Weee app, inspired by “Turning Red,” a coming-of-age movie about a Chinese Canadian teen who turns into a giant red panda. Chu interviewed the film’s director, Domee Shi, about the making of the film and unwrapped some of her favorite snacks from her childhood.
Chu and Liu said that by telling the stories behind dishes, the grocery service can introduce people to new traditions and flavors.
Erin Edwards, 34, of Santa Ana, California, and her family are one of those eaters. Edwards, who is not Asian or Hispanic, placed her first order with Weee in February after watching a video shared by a friend. Since then, she has continued to shop with the site to supplement her weekly shopping at Trader Joe’s and Target.
Her family of four has bought Chinese snacks and ingredients for Asian recipes, from crab-flavored potato chips to noodles for homemade pho. Pocky, Japanese chocolate chip cookie sticks, has become a favorite dessert for her 2-year-old daughter Holland and 4-year-old daughter Wren.
“When you see people making videos and doing tutorials, it becomes so easy,” she said. “We are much more empowered to do it ourselves.”
Liu said he sees a similar culture of sharing in his three young children.
“Their classmates, regardless of their skin color, they all drink boba milk tea. They all eat sushi. They all eat Korean barbecue and Indian curry and Mexican tacos,” he said. “So I think the tastes of the future generation will be very, very diverse. In a way, we’re really building the range for the future cultural explorers.”
Disclosure: CNBC is owned by NBCUniversal, the parent company of Universal Pictures.
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