FreshDirect

FreshDirect


FreshDirect is an online grocer that delivers to residences and offices in the New York City metropolitan area. FreshDirect also offers next-day delivery to most of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, Staten Island, Nassau County, Westchester County, Fairfield County, Hoboken, New Jersey and Jersey City, New Jersey. The company was founded by Joe Fedele and Jason Ackerman, a former investment banker who specialized in the grocery industry. FreshDirect custom-prepares groceries and meals for its customers, a manufacturing practice called Just In Time that reduces waste and improves quality and freshness.

Introduced to the New York market in 2002, FreshDirect grew popular for its convenience, fresh food and lower prices than many Manhattan supermarkets.[1] FreshDirect is popular for its distribution of organic food and locally grown items, as well as items that consumers see in supermarkets daily. FreshDirect also delivers numerous Kosher foods and is recognized by the Marine Stewardship Council as a certified sustainable seafood vendor.[2]
Contents
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* 1 Operations
* 2 Controversy over unionization vote
* 3 See also
* 4 References
* 5 External links

[edit] Operations

FreshDirect uses SAP AG software to process thousands of orders placed on its website every night. Orders are dispatched to the kitchen, bakery, deli as well as fresh storage rooms, produce ripening rooms and production areas within the company's refrigerated facility. All order components are custom-cut, packaged, weighed and priced. In the case of dry goods or frozen foods, items are picked from storage before being placed inside bins that travel along conveyors to the sorting area. There, products in a customer's order are scanned and gathered in corrugated fiberboard boxes. The boxes are labeled, recorded and loaded into refrigerated delivery trucks.

FreshDirect is based in a 300,000-square-foot (28,000 m2) building in Long Island City and is one of the largest employers in the area. Though the website and plant processes were in development for several years before its public launch, the company made its first deliveries to Roosevelt Island on July 11, 2002. FreshDirect has since expanded service to Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the The Bronx and parts of Nassau County, Westchester County and New Jersey. The company now has almost 2,000 employees, 250,000 customers, and has delivered more than 6,000,000 orders.