Big Feed Club all about convenience
New online service let’s customers buy groceries, schedule deliveries
For some, finding time to head out of their home to go grocery shopping can prove to be an elusive quest.
Others may find it physically difficult to shop in a store, or be wary of doing so because of underlying health conditions. The latter concern is more commonplace these days amidst a global health pandemic.
That's where the Big Feed Club enters the picture. The online service lets customers choose from thousands of products, pay for them online and schedule a delivery to their doorstep the next day.
“You can hop on our website (bigfeedclub.ca), place an order, pick your day and pick your time, which is really important for people,” said Bradley Russell, who co-owns the venture with his friend Jamie Heath.
“We've noticed a lot of our customers prefer delivery in the evenings versus the day.”
The two friends have been thinking about starting a business like this for a couple of years and finally got serious about it a year ago. Big Feed Club had a soft launch in December, and interest in the service picked up dramatically during the recent COVID-19 lockdown on the Avalon Peninsula.
TYPES OF CUSTOMERS
Busy families, people with mobility issues, seniors and parents ordering for university students are among the types of customers taking advantage of the service. Big Feed Club delivers throughout the Northeast Avalon, from Pouch Cove down as far as Avondale and throughout St. John's metro. They envision making it a provincial service someday.
“When you're getting out to either one of those places (Avondale or Pouch Cove), the feedback I'm getting is to leave their home and go come into Costco or one of the bigger grocery stores in town, if you count their commute and packing up their groceries in the car and shopping, it's like three hours out of their day,” Heath said. “For a busy family, if you're taking three hours out of your Saturday if you're working all week, that's pretty valuable.”
The company has progressive values at its heart. Big Feed Club pays a living wage to its employees and builds all service costs into product pricing. Delivery drivers, of which Heath is often one, are not expecting tips at the door. The owners are also cognizant of the environmental impact of deliveries.
“There's lots of different types of businesses in this space, but we wanted to be different and offer a sustainable solution where, first of all, we offset 100 per cent of our carbon (emissions) for our deliveries (through Less Canada), but also that we pay a living wage,” Russell said. “It's very important to us that people that work with us don't have to rely on tips to make a living. That was a core tenet of what we wanted to do since the beginning.”
HOW IT WORKS
Currently, Big Feed Club is a team of five. For now, all the products are purchased directly from Costco in St. John's the day they're due for delivery — that way they're still fresh. The customer's order must be at least $100 and they can select a three-hour window for delivery. They're using one delivery van, but that will change as the business scales up — Heath would eventually like to transition to electric vans.
The business plans to eventually involve more locally produced goods. Big Feed Club recently started carrying jams from The Jam Lady, and it's in talks with a local bakery about selling some specialty boxes of tasty treats.
"I think it's going to depend on us growing, getting more customers and more people buying," Heath said. "A bakery, for example, they're not going to want to make one batch of cookies each morning to pick up. We need to scale up and become a bigger business before we can go and take on a bunch of local companies ... But we're going to slowly add on local businesses."
A little over four months in, Russell and Heath are happy about the business. Their experience dealing with an influx of new customers during the lockdown left Heath feeling good about the future.
"We handled it very well in my opinion, and it makes me confident that we're going to be able to grow and handle more orders and have vehicles and more employees," he said.