Martie, an online grocer that sells heavily discounted surplus items makes its national debut today. Customers can now purchase products in any U.S. state. All orders are shipped from its recently opened Texas warehouse.
The expansion comes at a time when grocery prices continue to rise and inflation remains high, offering a solution to help relieve food budgets, according to the retailer. The online retailer delivered to 12 states in April, was available in 20 states in June and expanded to 34 states in July.
The platform offers shelf-stable national and specialty food brands for direct-to-home shipping. It showcases a range of food items, including pasta and pasta sauces, rice and beans, coffees and teas, cooking oils, and snacks, along with a selection of organic, gluten-free, vegan, and keto options. The company also offers household, health & beauty, and pet products.
Martie presents a treasure-hunting experience that is grounded by a few essential “always on” categories, according to the retailer.
“We're always going to have enough peanut butter, coffee, pasta, tea, pasta sauce, and snacks, for example, but I can’t guarantee that we’ll have ‘Santa Cruz’ or ‘Justin’s’ brand peanut butter at any given time,” Martie CEO and co-founder Louise Fritjofsson told SFA News Daily.
Instead, the company seeks to facilitate exploration that is easy and affordable. The co-founder explained that the grocer allows customers to try new brands and products they wouldn’t feel comfortable with at full price. The platform also leverages shopping insights to present products that return shoppers would find more meaningful.
“We make sure we don’t show you pet products if you don’t own a pet,” she said.
Martie also holds live shopping events weekly where Fritjofsson and other employees talk about available products on the platform.
“We talk to our audience; they can send in and request that we do live shopping with a few items that they are interested in so we can show them off before they move forward with the purchase. That's been really fun and successful way to engage with our audience,” said Fritjofsson.
The co-founder noted that coffee, olive oils, nut butters, pasta, and snack bars are among its bestsellers.
The company works to address two issues in its mission: the U.S.’s food waste problem and food insecurity. By offering an attractive liquidation solution to the brand’s excess inventory, Martie can mark down those goods, making them more accessible.
“We are thrilled that every person in this country will have access to surplus items at a discounted rate, including specialty and premium items. Martie promises significant savings and to always stock our online [marketplace] with the essentials you know and need,” Fritjofsson said in a statement. “By selling surplus items that would otherwise go to waste, we are enabling customers to be environmental heroes simply by shopping discounted groceries.”
Martie partners with over 2,500 brands and producers to shop their supply of surplus goods. These are items that would otherwise be thrown out due to overstock, package changing, nearing best-by dates, or seasonality. Through this strategy, Martie has saved more than two million pounds of food from going to the landfill, instead diverting it to customers, according to the company.
Fritjofsson explained that this model attempts to “democratize sustainability” by allowing people to make environmentally friendly purchasing decisions on a budget. She explained that traditionally sustainable purchases like buying an electric car or substituting plastic wrap for recyclable beeswax all come with cost barriers that Martie hopes to alleviate.
Fritjofsson told SFA News Daily about the steps that led Martie to be able to ship nationwide.
She shared that her most proud achievement, which also enabled the company’s scalability, was having achieved positive unit economics within its first 20 months, a large hurdle in the online grocery industry.
“For me as an entrepreneur, it doesn’t make sense to keep expanding unless you have a model that can grow with profitability,” she said. She added that operations efficiency also played a key role.
Martie hopes to serve the online grocery market as ‘the Ikea of foods,’ said Fritjofsson.
“Ikea looks good, and everyone knows it's affordable and it's modern. But it also is not super convenient: you get home, you need to build your own bed,” she said. “Martie is the same. We look good, we're modern, we have amazing and affordable products, but we're not the most convenient: we don't do fresh nor frozen.”
“That’s where we want to be. We want to win on affordability, we're not just the most accessible, as items can take a few days to ship. We want to create a fun shopping experience out of groceries, which can often feel tedious or necessary.”
The discount grocer is concerned with creating a win-win scenario for both food producers and customers. On the producer side, Martie seeks to make liquidation look attractive by creating for brand partners a positive marketing experience. Fritjofsson said that they often work with brands that have never before considered a liquidation source but are drawn to the environmental benefits and the marketing opportunity it can provide.
Related: Sprouts Expands Philadelphia Footprint; Whole Foods Coffee Bears Sourced for Good Seal
Image: Martie