Necessity creates opportunity
Virtual grocery shopping became more popular during the pandemic lockdowns. Weee, a startup focused on Asian grocery delivery, was no exception.
Its founder, Larry Liu, said he started the company out of dissatisfaction with local Asian grocery stores. He spoke with The Associated Press about how the pandemic affected grocery delivery, Weee’s expansion goals after raising over $300 million and how Weee’s customers saw the pandemic coming long before other Americans.
Why did you start Weee?
In the Bay Area where I live, it took me 25 minutes to get to the closest Chinese store. It’s relatively harder to get access to, and also the shopping experience is not great. They’re usually very crowded, and the assortment is usually pretty old. A lot of the products were actually from the 80s, when most of the stores were set up in this country.
What was the effect of the coronavirus pandemic?
We have a lot of Chinese immigrant customers, so the pandemic actually impacted our customers psychologically before everybody.
What was that psychological effect?
In China, the shutdown of Wuhan happened in mid-January. At that time a regular American wouldn’t think much about the pandemic. But as Chinese immigrants started to see that in China, they started to be more cautious and started to buy more online. The first U.S. case was in Seattle (in January). Immigrant communities just took that a lot more seriously than the general public. We’re seeing demand growing very rapidly in February. In early February we started to require our employees to wear masks and take everybody’s temperature every day.
Was it frustrating to see the response of people in the U.S. to the pandemic in early 2020, given what you saw happening in China?
I wouldn’t say frustrating. Nobody knew what’s going to happen, right? I think we took the situation more seriously than a regular business that probably didn’t see what’s happening in China. We tried to tell everyone, hey, we need to take this seriously. It could be a big catastrophic thing.
Now that you’ve raised this money, what do you want to do?
We’re constantly expanding to other markets. Right now we have fulfillment centers in five cities, we’re adding a few this year across the U.S. We’re also trying to expand in Canada in the near future.
Why are you adding Hispanic foods to the business?
We looked at the demographics. The reason we chose Asian and Hispanic, there are a lot of similarities between the two groups. They’re growing, they’re underserved.