Start Grocery Delivery Online Weee! He encourages customers to share recipe videos and favorite items on his app. It specializes in hard-to-find Asian foods, along with fruits, vegetables, and other staples.
Wee!
Online grocery startup Weee specializes in hard-to-find foods from Asian and Spanish cuisines. I discovered another kind of rarity earlier this year: a big Hollywood name in its executive suite.
The company hired John M. Chu, director of “Crazy Rich Asians” and chief creative officer for the film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights.” Chu transfers his storytelling expertise from movies, where food and culture play a major role, to an in-house team of about 10 highlighting unique dishes and the ingredients needed to make them — sold on Weee’s ever-expanding online program.
Chu said he envisions bringing funky features to online grocers, such as playlists of songs customers can listen to while they cook or a follow-up email they might receive about the history of items they purchased.
“For me, that was more important than just doing a job for a startup,” he said. “This was about telling my story taking 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 different languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean or Spanish. On the app, shoppers can also order takeaways from over 1,000 restaurants.
The San Francisco Bay Area startup now delivers fresh groceries to 18 states and shelf-stable products to all of the lower 48 states. It has eight fulfillment centers across the country, in states including Washington to New Jersey, where orders are filled and shipped.
The company is trying to stand out in a fragmented space — and a preview of what online grocery shopping might look like in the future. The grocery app and website is changing the typical online food shopping experience to make it more social and immersive.
Weee encourages customers to upload videos of recipes and favorite foods to its app through a TikTok-like feature. Shoppers can purchase the snacks and ingredients in these videos with the click of a button. They get discounts if they refer a friend or family member and can share coupons dedicated to recently purchased items.
“We just think food shopping shouldn’t be like what we see today,” said founder and CEO Larry Liu. “It should be so much better, more inspiring and fun.”
Changing tastes
Over the past couple of years, consumers have embraced new ways to fill refrigerators and have developed expanded tastes while cooking more at home. It inspired some to try meal kits, get groceries delivered to their doors or use curbside pickup.
The Covid pandemic has fueled Weee’s growth. The privately owned, venture-backed startup declined to share its total clients and revenue, but said it has fulfilled more than 15 million orders so far. The number of monthly active users has grown by more than 150% year-over-year. To date, the startup 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 has also stimulated the online grocery market in the United States, which represents a small but growing portion of the industry’s total sales. Online grocery sales nearly doubled from $29.3 billion in 2019 to $57 billion in 2020, according to IRI E-Market Insights and Coresight Research. Online grocery sales in the country will reach nearly $90 billion this year, according to company estimates. However, bricks and mortar still dominate the grocery category, with as much as 95% of retail spending on food being done in stores in 2021, according to Coresight research.
Online grocery retailers don’t have sample stations, colorful displays and other experiences that draw people into stores and speed up purchases, said Ken Fenio, head of research and consulting at Coresight Research.
In stores, customers can “smell the fruit. Walk down the aisles and see if there’s something new you want. You might have that shell” Oh, I forgot I needed that. Let me throw it. ‘ he said. ‘The Internet tends to be more dependent on search, and more dependent on listings.’
Venue said retailers like Weee can revive experiential items for grocery shopping to make e-commerce more exciting and personalized. Other direct-to-consumer grocers have customized specialties, such as Thrive Market, which sells organic and natural foods, or Misfits Market and Imperfect Foods, which sells high-quality groceries for less by offering deformed fruits and vegetables, chopped almonds, or similar products.
Venue said the challenge for Wei and other smaller online grocery players is to win over new customers, keep delivery costs low and fend off traditional grocers, who might be encroaching on their territory.
Larry Liu, a Chinese immigrant, started Weee! Because of his struggles to find favorite foods.
Wee!
immigrant’s story
For Liu, 41, the challenges that inspired Wei were personal.
Liu, a first-generation Chinese immigrant, founded the company in 2015 after struggling to find some of his favorite foods. He was tired of the hour-and-a-half drive to his nearest Asian market and was inspired by seeing WeChat groups organized by others who missed the tastes of home. In one, a woman coordinated a group order of friends — and friends of friends — who wanted to buy fresh cod from Half Moon Bay in California.
That experience later shaped some of the distinctive features of the Weee app, such as the “Community” tab that resembles a social media network with a mix of user- and business-generated videos.
Liu said Weee caters to clients who live in sparsely populated communities to support a large Asian market like H Mart, from international students attending college in the United States to seniors living in assisted living facilities. He said most customers order more than twice a month and Weee makes up about 40% to 50% of their monthly grocery budget.
Wei is gradually adding Spanish foods as well. It serves Mexican cuisine in California and Texas.
Popular items include daily staples like rice and fresh vegetables, along with seasonal items, like winter sweet watermelons from Vietnam, hot pot combos from southern China and sesame cake from northern China during the Lunar New Year.
The app features a rotating list of suggestions as well, such as Japanese snacks to celebrate Sakura, cherry blossoms, the season, or Mother’s Day gifts. It also offers a growing assortment of beauty and household items, such as Korean cosmetics.
John M. Choo attends the Disney premiere of “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” at El Capitan Theater on August 16, 2021 in Los Angeles, California.
Axel | Power Griffin | Magic movie | Getty Images
A new kind of storytelling
Before Wei hired Director Cho, he had already seen the company’s delivery trucks, heard about the company from friends, and began getting deliveries as a customer of Korean barbecue ingredients like sauce and short ribs. Intrigued by the company and its mission, reach out to Leo. Their talks led to a job offer.
Chu will soon begin directing a Universal Pictures adaptation of “Wicked” on Broadway with 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 Chef Chu’s Bar, the family restaurant that his parents opened in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1969. The restaurant is featured in a video about Weee’s goal of connecting generations and cultures through food.
Zhou, who is now a father, said he wants to make sure his three young children learn about their culture.
“I wanted them, when they smelled of Asian food, [to feel] He said, “It wasn’t strange or strange to them. It was home to them as it was to me.”
Chu recently leveraged his connections at Hollywood’s Rolodex, collaborating with Disney and Pixar to develop recipes and shoot videos for the Weee app inspired by “Turning Red,” a movie about a Chinese-Canadian teenager who transforms into a giant red panda. Cho interviewed the film’s director, Dom Shi, about making the film and unpacked some of her favorite childhood snacks.
By telling the stories behind the dishes, Zhou and Liu said, grocery service can introduce people to new traditions and flavors.
Erin Edwards, 34, of Santa Ana, California, and her family are among those types of eaters. Edwards, who is not Asian or Latina, made her first Wei order in February after watching a video shared by a friend. Since then, she’s continued to shop with the site to supplement her weekly shopping at Trader Joe’s and Target.
Her family of four bought Chinese snacks and ingredients for Asian recipes, from crab-flavored potato chips to noodles for homemade pho. Pocky, a Japanese chocolate-dipped biscuit stick, has become a favorite dessert for her 2-year-old daughter Holland, and her 4-year-old daughter, Wren.
“Watching people make videos and do tutorials, it makes it so easy,” she said. “We’ve been more powerful in doing it ourselves.”
Liu said he sees a similar culture of participation in his three young children.
“Their classmates, regardless of their skin color, all drink boba tea with milk. They all eat sushi. They all eat Korean barbecue, Indian curry, and Mexican tacos,” he said. “So I think the future generation, they’re going to have very diverse tastes. In a way, we’re really building a lineup for future cultural explorers.”
Disclosure: CNBC is owned by NBCUniversal, the parent company of Universal Pictures.