Building H Index

FreshDirect

INDUSTRY

food

products Profiled

FreshDirect online grocery delivery service

H-Score

52

ranked 5th of 16 within food industry

ranked 17th of 37 overall

product description

FreshDirect is an online grocery delivery service that largely focuses on delivering fresh foods to its users. FreshDirect started its service in New York City, later expanding its delivery service to the local New York Metropolitan Area and certain counties in Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area. Orders are purchased and delivered from FreshDirect, unlike delivery services that deliver retail items from other stores.

product usage

Shoppers order items from FreshDirect online through their website or the accompanying mobile app, indicating that users are likely sedentary when ordering.

influence on health-related behaviors

EATING

slight to moderate positive influence

FreshDirect facilitates the purchase of grocery items and thus its impact on the healthfulness of its customers' diets is largely dependent on the choices that the customers make and its influence on those choices.

Broadly speaking, grocery shopping leads to more home-cooked meals, which, in general, have been shown to be healthier than meals eaten out or ordered from restaurants.(1-5) People who cook at home more frequently also tend to have diets that have higher compliance with dietary guidelines.(6)

In Building H’s consumer research, over 90% of users of online grocery delivery services (not specific to FreshDirect) said that their groceries were healthier (67.9%) or as healthy as (23.2%) takeout or delivery meals.(7)

FreshDirect’s homepage consists of multiple features – collections of food items by different, often timely, themes. A set of food categories appears in a top menu. Just as the organization and presentation of items in a physical supermarket can influence shopper behavior, FreshDirect’s choices about what to display most prominently can also influence behavior. At the time of review, the homepage featured many healthy items, including fruits, vegetables, salads and seafood items. The top menu featured fruits (second item) and vegetables (third) prominently, although prepared foods, which can often be less healthy than fresh ingredients(8), was the first category listed. FreshDirect does not specifically offer a “healthy” category, although it does include “vegan & vegetarian” and “local” categories.(9)

Fresh Direct facilitates home cooking by offering an integrated recipe service that connects ingredients in recipes to the online shopping cart.(10)

Online grocery delivery services can promote healthier shopping choices and promote access to healthier foods in transportation-scarce and low-resource areas.(11)

opportunities:

Work across the industry to pursue options to rate the healthfulness of individual food items and then consider using such ratings to give users feedback on overall healthfulness of their orders and/or propose healthy substitutions for less healthy items.
Expand EBT purchasing pilot to all customers when eligible.

PHYSICAL ACTVITY

neutral to slight negative influence

While FreshDirect promotes home cooking, it also potentially deters customers from the physical activity associated with grocery shopping. FreshDirect allows customers to shop while sedentary, which can be detrimental to physical health. Note that users of online grocery delivery services typically continue to shop in person to some degree as well, so the effect is a reduction, rather than a substitution, in in-person grocery shopping. In Building H’s consumer research, nearly half (46.8%) of users of grocery delivery services (not specific to FreshDirect) also shopped in person more than twice a month.(12)

On the other hand, assuming that the grocery shopping leads to home cooking, cooking a meal certainly involves more physical activity than preparing ready-to-eat or takeout/delivery meals.

Sleeping

slight positive influence

Travel time has been shown to have a negative relationship to sleep time, so the service could improve sleep for users to the extent it cuts down on trips to the grocery store and time spent shopping.(13)

Additionally, if FreshDirect’s service cuts down on stress related to grocery shopping in-person (travel, finding groceries in-store, time crunches, etc), it could also reduce stress-related decreases in sleep quality.(14)

Engaging Socially

slight negative influence

FreshDirect’s service allows customers to stay at home while shopping. As such, the service likely reduces the casual social interactions associated with trips to grocery stores. In Building H’s consumer research, 54% of shoppers (not specific to FreshDirect) rated these interactions positively, as compared with 9% rating them negatively.(15)

opportunities:

Offer party planning features to simplify the process of developing menus and ordering ingredients as a way to lower the barriers to hosting meals with friends and family.

Getting Outdoors