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A
For over 50 years, mass market retailers, MMR has been the definitive media authority across key retail channels including discount, grocery club, e commerce and specialty. Now, Retail MediaIQ, MMR's parent company, is building on that legacy by integrating the trusted editorial insights and extensive reach of chain drug review into the MMR platform. At the Same time, Retail MediaIQ is expanding its editorial focus to include the fast moving convenience store channel. The result is a powerful, unified media platform that reflects the full scope of today's retail ecosystem. Backed by decades of expertise, deep industry knowledge and editorial excellence, the new mmr, which debuts in October, will deliver the most comprehensive view of retail and reach the largest, most easiest influential audience of decision makers across the retail and consumer packaged goods sector. The strategic expansion of MMR mirrors the challenging dynamics of the industry and affirms the publication's mission to be the go to source for insights, analysis and access across every retail vertical. Check out the link in the digital liner notes to this episode. To reach mmr, make sure you're subscribing to their newsletter.
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B
Hi, I'm Fuad Hannon, Vice President of new verticals at DoorDash. You're listening to the CPG Guys Podcast.
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A
Welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast. Your host Shree Rajagopalan and Peter V. S Bond explore how brands and retailers engage consumers in an increasingly digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG Guys.
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C
Hello and welcome to this episode of the CPG Guys. I'm of course sri, your co host and also CRO and co founder of ThinkBlue Consulting, your trusted partner in your omnichannel development journey. You can get in touch with me and hear all about Think blue consulting at SRI thinkblueconsulting co. That's.com Please do listen to my older daughter's music at www.rearaj.com and follow laraj. My younger daughter is a member of the world's fastest growing global group, Catseye now, winner of an MTV VMA and they've crossed the billion streaming mark. Yeah, I said B with the billion. Unable to join me today is actually my co host and co founder Peter V. S Bon, who moonlights his head of Industry and Client Engagement at Flywheel, the Commerce acceleration division of Omnicom. Make sure you're subscribing to our podcast on your preferred listening platform where you can get our latest episodes and then go back to consume some of the 520plus episodes we've already put out there. Today's episode is episode two in this season with Doordash Fouad Hanan is the VP of New business verticals at DoorDash and this only leads a team responsible for building new operating capabilities and Delivery channels at DoorDash to expand our local commerce platform to new growth areas. Prior to this current role, Fouad was headed New business verticals at DoorDash, previously a general Manager and was part of the founding team for DoorDash Drive, the company's white label fulfillment platform. Pride of Doordash Fuad worked at Google leading the Google Express operations and began his career as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company. Fouad holds a BS from University of Minnesota, all known well to me through my General's days and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. Join us in welcoming to the podcast Fouad and Fouad Friday afternoon. Thanks for doing this late in the day. How you doing man?
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B
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. It's a beautiful Friday. Pumped to be with y'.
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C
All.
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B
Excited to chat.
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C
Yeah, we're excited to have you on the podcast because our listeners have actually asked to know more about DoorDash and that's what we do. We provide the reach and hopefully this message goes through to those who've been craving to understand more, especially after episode one that aired a few weeks ago. So if you haven't read it, all you got to do is literally go to Google and type CPG guys DoorDash and you'll find the episode and of course in the digital line and notes of this episode, we'll include links to Fouad's LinkedIn profile and that outdoor DoorDash. So I'm going to jump into it and you know, lots of things going on in the grocery world for it's through the last two and a half years the grocery world has struggled for volume and due to the inflationary challenges and has really looked for how can they really take on Omnichannel in the big way. Make sure they're available for every customer, every touch point. And y' all have therefore understood that and said grocery has been a big area of investment for you. Can you tell us about what progress you made and how do you see DoorDash's own role evolving in this space?
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B
Yeah, it's a great question. So to your point, we've been really excited about DoorDash for the better part of the last four to five years. The core of the DoorDash idea was how do you take every business that exists in a local economy, whether it's a restaurant, a grocery store, convenience store and help bring that online and give consumers tons of access and choice, while also helping each of these retailers compete in a digital economy. As we think about our work in grocery, it is really underpinned by the same foundations that helped us compete in restaurants. Consumers want lots of selection, great quality, competitive prices, all delivered really, really quickly. And grocery has been a really, really interesting foray for us as we've thought about extending the doordash platform. The use case is very different. In restaurants, you often open up doordash. You open it up because you're hungry. 30, 45 minutes later, something gets delivered to your door. In the case of grocery, that might be the case. Oftentimes we have three little ones at home. It's the middle of the week, it's 5:30. My wife and I are like, we need groceries. We can get something delivered in 45 minutes. But in many cases it's a planned purchase and it's a more involved purchase. Do you want a state that has a lot of marble in it? Do you want fresh bananas for banana bread that you're making? Or do you want them for later in the week? And so what we've been doing is taking the capabilities that we have and layering on new grocery specific capabilities to solve customer problems and to solve dasher and merchant problems. An example of this might be something like photo verification. So today a dasher will go into the store, take a picture of a barcode. From that barcode, we can infer the weight of, you know, a piece of meat, for example, the expiry date, the price of it, et cetera. And so these are things that we've had to build for us to become real grocery platform. I think the last thing I would say is we've been really focused on bringing on more and more merchants. One of the really fun things about grocery is that every region have, it has its beloved grocer. You know, you've got a Minnesota connection where I'm based and where I'm from, I grew up with Cub Foods in my local grocer. Today in the upper Midwest, you might think about a Hy Vee or a Meijer. And so you've got these real regional merchants that people tend to love, that they grew up with, their parents grew up with. And so much of our work has been earning the trust of these merchants to help partner with them and bring them onto the doordash platform. And so it's been a really fun time in our, in our evolution of going from a restaurant. Only need it now. Use case or product to becoming a multi category product where you know, today I ordered lunch from DoorDash but tomorrow I'll be able to order ingredients to have a weekend party. And how do you pull all those different use cases together through a single app? It's been a lot of fun the last couple of years as we've inflected that.
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C
I gotta tell you, when Peter and I got to grocery shop at Mandalay Bay we'll be recording some episodes from there. We recorded a bunch of episodes from there and the first thing we do for our suite is we wait for the dasher to get to the front of the hotel with our beverages, snacks and a whole host of other things. We don't use the catering services because we want to get exactly what we want to get. When we want to get. We want to make sure we're available and make sure we make sure to tip that dasher pretty well. So I encourage everybody. These people do a tough job. Make sure you tip your dash in. And by the way for I'm addicted to the dash pass so hopefully after this will make the CPG guys make it easy for them to have dash person. I'm just, I'm just kidding for it. But it's great that you guys are making huge investments in this place and understanding the role of grocery. Today's consumer is 365, 24. 7. They want to have the ability. Many grocery stores are 24 hours but for safety reasons people don't want to drive there. They don't want to be out at 11:30pm at night. But they want something urgently. Is there a better way than rely on a dasher to bring it to you? Probably not. So that's what we did at grocery shop and we enjoyed the experience perfectly, which is pretty awesome.
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B
It's a really astute observation that like I think that one of the things that, that we and others sort of have been uncovering is that we tend to think of consumers as sort of like one consumer. Like this is a weekly shop consumer or this is a insert your favorite grocer consumer. But what we've come to learn over the years is that like the consumer really varies based on the use case or the trip. The consumer that on a Friday night might be having, you know, ice cream and drinks delivered might be the same consumer who's getting $150 of groceries delivered on Sunday for their family. And so how do you address those different use cases has been a thing that we've. We've really leaned into and found A lot of success in.
- [09:32]
A
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C
Yeah, the use cases are actually far more than what I think the average person will think of because it's not just food. And Bev, Peter and I use DoorDash for many other things. And by the way, that's a laundry list of sri's orders. It just goes on and on and on. You can see it scrolls down page. Maybe we can write a thesis on my orders. Peter and I just. The CPG guys just find it too convenient to have a dasher do the homework for us. It just saves us time more than anything else. And the convenience is just insanely good if there was such a word. I want to jump a little bit deeper into consumer behavior. Right? There are all kinds of consumer behaviors. I gave you some examples. We get food and bear, but we also get a bunch of other stuff from our dash here from DoorDash. So when you guys mine through the data, how does consumer behavior in grocery differ from other categories in on demand delivery? Peter and I are chronic users of it. And what opportunities does this create for grocery brands to leverage and take advantage of?
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B
Yeah, it's a. It's to your point. Sri. It's a lot of fun seeing how consumers use the platform and how we can help solve different consumer problems. If you look at for example, in restaurants, consumers tend to have their staples. Like you have your favorite Thai restaurant, you have your favorite Middle Eastern restaurant. People tend to go to those time and time again and there's a lot of habit or habituation rather in restaurants with retail on the other end of the spectrum. If you think about retail, what we see a lot on retail is there's a lot of what we call spear phishing it's consumers coming in and saying, I'm out of a specific thing, I'm out of a specific mascara, I need golf balls delivered. Right? So there's a lot of spear phishing. Grocery is very interesting. There's two things that I think differ in grocery vis a vis the other categories that doordash plays in the the first is that consumers build baskets. They build baskets over a longer period of time, right? You can imagine that over a few hours you might say, hey, we need groceries delivered. And if you're willing to wait, you can go and understand, okay, we're out of this or we need that, or we want to cook that. So I think that's one thing that we see that is pretty distinct is that consumers are building baskets and getting inspiration over longer periods of time, whereas restaurant or retail might be more immediate consumption. The second thing is that consumer, the grocery customer in America, they have an average of three to five grocers that they shop at. We see very similar data on the doordash platform. And so consumers typically know where they want to shop. They're willing to consider other merchants along the way, but they do have that sort of local, that local beloved merchant of theirs. And so they want to go to those merchants, they want to shop through them, etc. I think that's one thing. The second is that there is a different expectation with, in terms of affordability. Like we all go to the grocery store. I often take my kids walking to the grocery store that we live nearby. And this notion of affordability or deals, there's, there's always a buy one, get one or some level of a discount. And so the consumers really care to see that reflected on their digital shopping platform on doordash. That's not the case, for example, with restaurants where those type of in store deals aren't as prevalent. And so how do you bring those deals online and make them reflective? And as a brand, that really matters because you want to make sure that the deals that you're investing in to drive volume or to drive growth are reflected in your physical channels as well as your digital channels. And I think the last thing is that we see the order distribution tends to be dispersed far more normally throughout the day. Restaurants, as you might imagine, SRI is lunch and dinner with a bit of a late night peak. If you think about grocery, it's people that are, you know, early and earlier in the morning getting set up for the day. You have that kind of 3 to 4pm what are we doing for dinner crew? And then there's a late night sort of. You know, to your point on the 247 offering, there's that late night, we're out of this for tomorrow or we want this for a late night snack. And DoorDash has been able to address those various use cases throughout the. Throughout the platform that we've built.
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C
No doubt in my mind for that. The use cases are many in nature and they're also not time bound by any means. And that the. It's good to hear you explain how the actual profile of who shops when is a little different. You know there's immediacy needs dates, there's the dinner needs daily as I'm driving back from work or I'm wrapping up for the day. And there's a very targeted recipe. So one follow up question I have for you is have y' all thought about recipe based fulfillment? You know, somebody wants to make a pasta with I don't know like a chicken catch your door needs five things. Have you all thought about a one click fulfillment?
- [15:19]
B
Yeah. I love that you asked that question. It's one of the things that we're experimenting with and that we're really excited about. This is actually a world. I know it's the most used term these days in the world of technology. This is actually where AI and LLMs can become really, really interesting to sort of say I've got these two ingredients, what else can I make with it? Or what else do I need to make this pasta? Or I want to make chicken Alfredo, tell me what I need. So we're starting to experiment with that and think about how do you, how do you sort of surface that to the consumer to go to make it less sort of item by item shopping and more, more recipe based shopping. The interesting thing on, on, on top of that though is even if you were going to go do that, you might have a different preference than I would. For example. And this is where some of like the deep personalization work that Doordash does becomes really important. You might be really loyal to a specific brand. I might be indifferent between brand A, brand B and then the private label brand of that merchant. And so those are some of the nuances that we still have to go solve. But yeah, I think recipe based shopping or one click shopping is a thing that we'll definitely keep investing in and testing into over the coming quarters and years.
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C
Great to hear that. You know normally I jump to AI right away since you mentioned it, but I'm not actually going to because I have so many other things to. This is going to be the first episode in 50 that we're not going to actually get deeply into AI because our audience wants to hear the doordash offerings as well as doordash ads offerings more than jump into AI and this one. So category momentum, right? As you're building all these great services, fulfillment and touching many, many categories, especially taking jumping into grocery in a deep way. What types of grocery categories of products are you seeing most success on on demand platforms and any reasoning for those?
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B
Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. So if you kind of step back and you sort of talk about the doordash user, today we have over 42 million monthly active users. So these are users that are coming to our platform every single month. They're transacting multiple times per month. Within that 42 million, 22 million of them are either DashPass or Volt plus, which is our international subscription offering. This is what you were alluding to earlier. So you've got this cohort of users that are digital first that that value convenience and value time to the conversation we were having earlier. So that's kind of where we start at the macro level. Within that 42 million, they're shopping for things in addition to restaurants, they're buying groceries, they're buying convenience items, they're buying snacks, et cetera. That's kind of how we think about the overall pie. And when we look at what consumers are engaging with DoorDashcon, there's a couple of things that really stand out. One is that categories like drinks and snacks really resonate on DoorDash. These are categories that tend to lend themselves well to where doordash originated, which is a need it now category. They are, you know, these are, these are either bulkier items if they're drinks or where delivery is a really compelling use case, or they're things that people need before they're going out for to go hang out with friends or to watch the game, for example. So that's one thing that we see that's really compelling our drink and snack categories. The other that we see a lot of demand on from a category perspective, which is one of my favorites is ice cream. Right. People often don't have a lot of ice cream in their freezer. But if you're having friends over or if you've got an impulse for ice cream, we see a lot of that that tends to unsurprisingly do really well in the late night category that we have to continue to lean into. And I think that nobody's really figured out how to do well, like really well online are things like buying meat and fish, for example. Right. If you, if you want to think about the, the butcher counter at your favorite local grocery store, I don't think anybody's nailed, including DoorDash nailed that shopping experience. That still leaves a lot to be desired. And that's where we're putting a lot of our investment area. You want to think about winning the total, the total shop of the consumer. But those are the couple categories that we, we see a lot of, a lot of strength in now. It's also really seasonal. What's interesting, so, you know, we are in October, if you think about early, early September when a lot of families are going back to school, you start seeing a lot of back to school type items. You see after school snacks emerging as a top category. You start seeing things like applesauces or things that can easily go in lunchboxes to be categories that do really well. And so there is a bit of a seasonality to the business that we see in terms of what consumers want from DoorDash vis a vis their favorite groceries.
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C
But all of a sudden, now I'm craving some hazelnut ice cream with dark chocolate chips. I wonder where that idea came from.
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B
But it was a bit of inception for you.
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C
Late afternoon Friday, I think after, after this episode, I'm pretty sure I know where I'm going next. Or, you know, what for. How about I just have a dasher bring it to me. That said, for Delhi is very unconquered today and a much needed change in customer experience for home delivery. Much luck to y' all if you all figure that one out. You're going to be so far ahead of the rest of the industry. And I'm going to say bravo.
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B
We're working hard at it. Lots of work to do, but we're excited about tackling it.
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C
I'm going to be a cheerleader and say bravo. Because if you pull it off, it'll be a huge advantage for customers who are actually shopping for this stuff on a daily basis. And now, announcement time. Last week at Grocery Shop, y' all unveiled that you actually have a new partner list and you have a big, new, exciting partner that you announced. Take us through what's new and exciting and generally take us through, you know, a list of your partners. I'm not expecting an exhaustive list here because your list is pretty long. But who are some of your top partners and who's new?
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B
Yeah, we're super excited, you know, to, to have the opportunity and the privilege to work with retailers that have been around for decades, if not nearly a hundred years is one of the privileges of the job. And so last week we announced that we're partnering with Kroger and all of their banners to bring their full grocery assortment onto DoorDash. We've been partnering with Kroger for a few years across some of their prepared foods, particularly sushi and then floral categories that do really well on DoorDash during events like Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. But what we're excited about is we're bringing them fully onto the platforms. We get really excited about that because the number one thing that consumers want from doordash is selection. This is the thing that we saw in early Doordash on the restaurant side. I joined the business in 2015 and the number one thing that we solved was consumers wanted selection. And it's honestly the same thing that we see in grocery and other categories. So when we step back and we think about one of the main jobs that we can go do for our consumers is bring on their favorite merchants. And we're really proud and honored to be able to work with Kroger. They've just been an awesome partner throughout the years and they're taking up a really, a really forward looking perspective on how do we win different use cases in different trips across grocery. What this means is based on sort of progressive grocer who tends to list the top 100 food retailers. I think now we partner with six of the top 10 in the US and even more globally. I think in the US it starts to look like Kroger and Albertsons and Aldi and top regionals like Wegmans and Meijer, all of Aahold's banners. And so, and there's a bunch of I'm missing. But we're really, we're really excited about this momentum as we try to become the platform for merchants and the platform for consumers to go to when they need anything delivered.
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C
Expecting you to give us the full list here. No worries. Fuan if you did, by the way, I'd call you some kind of a mega genius. And that said, that said, you said the key word you said was creating the right partnership with the merchants. That's where the action is at the end of the day. So here's the price question of the day from SRI of the CPG guys. Ralph's part of the Kroger network in because you said 2,700 approximate stores and banners. So Ralph's is a Kroger banner here in the west Coast. Now we got to do an applause just for that, for from now, guess where the ice cream is coming this afternoon.
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B
And you know, I know exactly where it's coming from.
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C
So 5pm Pacific today. Look out that whoever Mr. Ms. Dasher is, there'll be ice cream in the Raj household. So congratulations, first of all, that's a big one. So you guys must be very proud of bringing the Kroger family home into the app and delivering more convenience for customers at the end of the day. So convenience and necessity, right? Meal delivery, you open this conversation with that and necessity, which is grocery. And grocery does have some element of convenience, but largely trips stock up. And it's really necessity driven. But how does that create differentiated opportunities for brands on the ad platform?
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B
This is, I think, one of the things that I get most excited about when we talk to our brand partners, the CPGs, the folks that I think are probably largely listening to this. DoorDash is a really interesting platform because we are addressing the core eating categories across restaurants and across grocery just as a total platform. And the use cases, again, are pretty different. And then when you sort of look at the size of the audience that we've been fortunate enough to build, there's a really compelling opportunity to get in front of 40/4 million consumers to solve whatever problem that it is. And so some of the things that we end up seeing are there are brands that are new, that are looking for impressions, that are looking to get their product out there. And DoorDash can become a really strong partner for them because we have a lot of eyeballs and we have a lot of people opening up the app every single day looking for inspiration, looking for what's new across restaurant and grocery. And then we've got brands that are working with us on sort of more lower funnel tactics where they want to win a search term or they want to grow a specific trade area or geography, or if you're a brand and you really want to start showing progress at a given retailer that you're trying to grow into and go from maybe being in a hundred of their stores to a thousand of their stores, DoorDash can become a really strong partner because of the relationship that we have with the retailer and the brand to help with that growth story. The other thing that we end up being a really strong partner for, which I think is often overlooked, is insights, is how is the customer discovering my brand? Particularly for some of the newer or emerging brands, how are they discovering my brand? What is the path to purchase? Are they coming in through search? Are they finding me organically when they do purchase, are they coming back and are they retentive? These are some of the insights that we're able to, we're able to bring to merchants that, to our brands, excuse me, that has been super, super fun and engaging to build. Then there's a lot of other fun stuff that we can get we can go do. Whether it's double dash, which is our ability to take two orders, combine them into one from two different places. How might you buy, you know, your restaurant meal but then get, you know, top up groceries delivered later in that day, we can do a lot of really fun things on some of our brand and go to market campaigns, whether it's the super bowl, whether it's summer dash, pass, et cetera. And so the big thing that we want to do is we want to become a growth partner to these brands. And what that means is very, very different is if you're a new brand trying to get into physical stores or if you're an established brand trying to fend share, we want to be a growth partner across all of that. And I think that's where doordash can become a really strong partnership to our brands.
- [26:54]
C
By the way, I do a lot of double dashing. Almost on every single order I'm adding a coffee. Want to guess what's the other item I add to when I'm getting a meal, I take a while.
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B
Ice cream.
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C
Ice cream. There we go. So I'm very familiar with the double dashing. But for our benefit of our audience, can you just give a 30 second primer on what is double dashing?
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B
Double dash is you order from any merchant and along the way we can pick up something else. So what you often see is someone's ordering dinner and they want to get coffee or Boba delivered or they want to get groceries for tomorrow. And because we've got one of the largest on demand logistics engines that power all of this, we're able to do that with the same dasher, lower cost. The customer loves it because they can get two things delivered at once. The merchants love it because it's incremental sales. Brands love it because they can get in front of the consumer. The way I think of this tree is almost like, you know, when you go to the grocery store and there's the things at the checkout aisle that you add. When you sort of have built your cart, we can build the digital version of that. And that's, that's what double dash is.
- [27:55]
C
The famous Department 82 or Impulse, a reminder to audience that I'm speaking with, Fouad Hanan, VP of New Business Verticals at DoorDash. Let's now jump into best in class partnerships. So those listening, especially brands, are going to want to say how do I take advantage of this? How can I be part of this ecosystem? And together, how can you all deliver for the MVP in our industry, the customer? So can you share an example of a partnership with a grocery focused CPG that illustrates what this best in class partnership could look like with DoorDash?
- [28:27]
B
So as an example, one that comes to mind is take Kellanova, which is formerly part of Kellogg's. It's their snacking cereal Frozen spinoff. They've got brands for those that are unfamiliar. Pringles, Cheez, its Eggo, Morningstar Farms, among, among others. They were an early adopter of as long as their, their ad agency as well with DoorDash, they sort of saw the potential of DoorDash going beyond restaurants and becoming a true multi category app. And so what that's done is that they have had a few looks at sort of like new product innovation. So back to Double Dash, they were one of the first brands to be able to partner with us on Double Dash because we had been working with them for a long time. We've got a couple of ad specific products, we've got sponsored products, which is, you know, an item based sort of experience where you know, you search for a term, et cetera. They were really early in adopting that. We've built sponsored brands, they've been key partners in that. And so they have adopted sort of the suite of growth products that DoorDash has. And they've been early to adopt. And part of, by being early to adopt, they also are just early to shape the roadmap. You know, everything that we're building SRI is, it's being built actively. And so our partners that we work with, they can shape the roadmap. They can say hey, this is the reporting I want or this is the comp that I want or I want to index against this, you know, this Turkana data or this Nielsen data. And we can help, we can help shape that. And then they're also sort of thinking about how can they get in front of the consumer beyond just the, the growth products for the ad products in the app. They're doing a lot of really fun things where you know, when we partner with them on our super bowl ad, for example, they do, we do a lot. Every year we run a summer of Dash Pass. Whereas a DashPass user, you get an incredible set of benefits across the totality of doordash. They were front and center in that. We can do it. We, we just set up a cardi b bodega out of our dashboards which we can talk about later. And they were partnered with us on that. And it's. That is not going to like the cardi b bodega example is them. That is a top of funnel tactic. That is how do they enter the lex, the cultural lexicon, how do they, you know, enter the consideration set or re enter the consideration set. Whereas something like sponsored products might be more bottom funnel. And so because we've got this totality of this experience and the product that we've built, being able to sort of pick and choose where in that stack you want to play is a thing that our top brands do. And for, you know, for some in year one it might be, hey, we want to drive units, we want to move volume. It's going to be bottom of funnel. For other years it might be, hey, we're introducing a bunch of new products and new innovation skus. We want to tell the world about it. It might be more top of funnel and we just want to be a partner to help our brands grow across that. And Kellanov has just been an awesome example. They've pushed us to be better, they've helped us innovate and we're fortunate to hopefully be part of their, their future growth story.
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C
You know the magic word, I hear it's full funnel, which is what brands desperately need today. As much as we're inclined to believe bottom funnel is everything today's urgent brand need is actually high on the upper funnel side. So you mentioned the cardi b bodega. Can you tell us a little bit more more about the cardi b bodega and how the upper funnel part of that is very attractive on something like.
- [31:47]
B
The cardi b bodega, like what we're trying to do is help drum up brand interests and help tell a story around a concept or an idea. And a lot of this is often done through our dashboard offering. Dashmar Doordash has owned and operated, you know, dark stores. These are, we've got, you know, we've got quite a few across the country. And what we want to do here is partner with brands. And so specifically on the cardi b bodega, what we did is before the official album release, like if you were, if you're a doordash user, you can get early access to the album, right? And that's like an example of something that we can do really uniquely because we've got the physical assets, we've got the consumer, we can go partner with a brand. In this case, it was Cardi B Bodega. We did this in mid September, and there's an opportunity to do a lot of things like that. As we think about, you know, trying to cut through the noise, I think consumers get a lot of messaging these days. How do you cut through the noise and build something really compelling for consumers? That's an example of something that we did in New York specifically.
- [32:54]
C
So I'm going to go a little deeper on the ad side at this point. So how does the growth of this grocery vertical we've been discussing now unlock new opportunities within DoorDash ads? And then there are other. There are very much other people offering similar services like y'. All. So what makes DoorDash a differentiated platform for grocery brands that they'd say, hey, I want to use doordash to run my campaigns on from the brand perspective.
- [33:22]
B
I think there's maybe like three things that stand out in terms of like where we think doordash can be differentiated. One, we talked about, you've got this restaurant consumer who, who is a corporate core. You know, everyone's buying groceries. So you've got this, a large restaurant consumer who you can get in front of and introduce your products to, get them, to adopt them, et cetera. That's thing number one. Thing number two is that within grocery, you know, a lot of our top brands are, they're obviously operating in core grocery channels, but they're also operating in a world where their products are in, you know, drug or dollar or C store segments. And DoorDash, we partner with the CVS's, the Walgreens, the Dollar Generals, the Seven Elevens of the world. And what that means is that by partnering with DoorDash, you can both drive growth in your core grocery channels, but also for maybe some of your more, more convenience focused user products, you can partner with us on those products in the convenience category. And then lastly, as part of our offering, we operate dashboard as I alluded to. And that can solve very, very different needs for a brand. Right. If you might think about dashmart, we aren't bound by the same rules and physics of traditional retail. So you can do things like test new innovation skews much more quickly. You don't have to wait for the twice a year reset that our retail partners have to deal with. You can do things like sampling more dynamically. And so doordash can become a partner that helps across the stack. And then lastly, I think the big thing that we see is, and we've been running incrementality study after incrementality study with third parties, with our brands, with our merchants. And what we're consistently seeing is that 79, 70 to 90% of our consumer, the consumer transactions are incremental to a merchant. And so if you're, if you're a brand, if you're a CPG who's 70.
- [35:13]
C
To 90% incremental for a merchant, from a merchant perspective, yeah, that's a big number. Congratulations.
- [35:19]
B
Thank you. Yeah, it's been, it's been. And this is one where this is like not us creating our own homework. This is us and our merchant partners sending our data to third parties. They then do the incrementality assessment and it kind of makes sense, right, because we're, because we're the, we're the fastest growing online grocery platform in the US more new users to online grocery start through DoorDash than any other channel. We're growing quickly. And because you're growing quickly, that can drive a lot of incremental growth. And so that has been the core of our, of our products and of our premise. I think that becomes a very interesting value prop for brands to work with. DoorDash.
- [35:53]
C
I'm glad we covered that one. And now announcement number two. You had another awesome announcement you did last week at Grocery Shop. On the dashboard side, I'm of course very familiar with this offering through my days at General Mills and even have walked one in New York City with you. What's new and exciting about who's leveraging this? Has the footprint expanded? What's going on with the dashmart? I heard something big.
- [36:19]
B
I love that you walked it and you know what we're talking about. Dashmark is DoorDash's owned and operated darkstore operation. Everything that we build at DoorDash, the vision of it is we want to build it, we want to operationalize it, we want to perfect it and then ultimately turn it into a platform for merchants. This is what we did with core logistics via our commerce platform business. This is what we've done with our digital ordering platform. And last week we announced Dashmar Fulfillment Services. This is simply a way for retailers to get in front of more consumers, operate 24, 7, 365 without through, you know, for their E comm channels, whether it's on their own E comm channel or through DoorDash without having to manage the operations in their physical store. If you Step Backstreet like the world that we've always imagined was pretty simple grocery delivery where the dasher has to go to the store, walk up and down the aisles that were beautifully merchandised by the people listening to this call and the dasher has to go shop through that. None of that was really optimized for E Commerce. E Commerce has been built on top of that because it was the necessary thing to get the industry going. But if you close your eyes and you imagine the future world, we always imagine something like Dashmar Fulfillment services where you've got purpose built operations, they're proximal to consumers. The whole thing has been optimized for delivery. Everything from receiving inventory to outbound to Dasher and that's what dashboard fulfillment services is. And we're super fortunate to be able to partner with the likes of CVS who are partnering with us across the country, Party City who is, you know, if you go to partycity.com and you're in range of a dashboard and you get something ordered for delivery being fulfilled out of dashboards and then, and then Kroger will also be working with us on this. And the core, the core of the idea is that there's a better way to do E commerce for grocery and local retail. And we're really excited about the announcement and we're excited about the partners that we have lined up to date.
- [38:22]
C
If you want to dig in more know More curious about DoorDash at Go Back and listen to the episode from late August. It was with Toby Espinosa who heads ads for Doordash and we had a pretty in depth discussion about all kinds of capabilities in doordash ads as well as upper funnel, lower funnel, lower funnel, middle funnel, as well as what a typical partnership would look like, what is best in class. So don't miss out on that episode. The best way to find it, all you have to do is go to Google or your favorite search platform and simply type CPG guys space DoorDash or CPG guys space Adobe Espinosa and you should be able to find find it or simply scroll down in our episode list on any platform including CPGuys.com, apple, Spotify, wherever you go to and simply find the episode. Late August August 27th. That easy so far. Moving on. Now I'll ask you to actually preach to brands or give advice. What advice would you give to grocery brands looking to scale their presence on.
- [39:20]
B
Digital platforms like Doordash And I will share thoughts and and this is a lot of what we've learned from Our top, our top brand partners. I think there's a couple of things and we kind of alluded to this a little bit ago, Sri, but I think think about the verticals that DoorDash offers as sort of distinct use cases. Kind of the way that you, that the brands run, run their, their physical world operations. They'll have somebody that owns club, they'll have somebody that owns, you know, traditional grocery. They'll have somebody that owns Dollar or drug. Think of Doordash in a very similar way. You know, we've got correct or grocery, you've got, you know, local love, two, three, four location grocery. You might have big, you know, big national grocery like we just talked about with the Kroger launch last week. And then you've got, you know, Dollar General, which solves a very, very different use case and a very, very different trip for their consumer. And so I think, think about how you can partner with DoorDash across that. The people that have been most successful, the brands that have been most successful come to us and they sort of say they have a point of view. They say, I want to grow, share at this, at this brand or in this category. And I think that's something that we want to go do with our key brand partners. I think the second thing is continue leaning into making sure that the pricing and the affordability that you've invested in, whether it's a national brand marketing campaign or in store signage, is reflected. Digital consumers today can price shop and they do price shop way more than they ever have before. Like, it is trivially easy to sort of search something on DoorDash on ChatGPT on other platforms and figure out what a thing should cost. And so the, the days of different pricing online versus offline, I think are likely behind us as for, for the brands that want to continue growing digitally. And then I think just, you know, see, see DoorDash as an, as an innovation partner. Like, we have gotten a lot of our best ideas, even going back to the restaurant days by simply just listening to what our partners want. You know, hey, I want to solve this. I want to enter this trade area, I want this marketing product. And so sort of see us as an innovation partner who can help you grow your business if something exists that you want that we don't offer. Like, you should tell the DoorDash room about it. We'd love to explore it, we'd love to build it alongside you all. That's been the source of the, of the majority of Doordash's great merchant or business Facing ideas over the last decade that I've been here.
- [41:45]
C
My big question on that one, for brands to actually give you that kind of suggestion. Here's what we'd like you to build or here's what we'd like to partner on. Is there like a client. What's the right word here? Like a manufacturer advisory board or anything you guys have?
- [42:01]
B
We do have our deep GVP partners that we work with. They're in our headquarters. We're in their headquarters. Multiple times a year. I, you know, I meet with these folks. Toby, who you alluded to, who's a good friend, meets with these folks very regularly. So we're constantly hearing from them in terms of we're missing this capability or this reporting. If they could only do this a little bit better. Or what's the next version of what the consumer Shop X looks like? Those are things that we work on very, very closely with our JVT partners. They have access to sort of the total doordash leadership team as we think about how to solve these problems for them and on behalf of them.
- [42:37]
C
Awesome. So now let's ask you the last question for this episode. I'm sad that it's the last question because this is a fun episode for me just because of how much I use this platform. We call it the fast forward question on the CPG guys. So let's jump into the future of grocery on DoorDash. What message would you want to leave for the CPG industry here about as well as retail merchants?
- [43:00]
B
Yeah.
- [43:00]
C
About doordash leadership in grocery and other new verticals.
- [43:04]
B
Perhaps one. Thank you. It's been an awesome. It's been an awesome podcast. It's been fun chatting with you on the other side of your general those days. I think a couple things that would just like love to leave our CPG partners and our retail partners. I think the first thing is that we definitely feel like we're here. You know, we talked about this earlier, but based on the progressive brochure list, we've got six of the top 10 in the U.S. we partner with the likes of Loblaws and Metro and others in Canada. We partner with Costco and Aldi in Australia. So we. This is a. This is a real thing for us. And the reason I mentioned that SRI is a few years ago, probably when you and I met in. In Grocery Shop for the first time, I think there was this question of, you know, is DoorDash for real? Like, are we really, you know, is grocery like an interesting side bet? Is it a side Quest. It's really difficult. It's different than restaurants and.
- [43:58]
C
Hold on, hold on. I know I asked you that. You were sitting on my left hand side and you're eating breakfast.
- [44:05]
B
Yes.
- [44:05]
C
I actually asked you that question and said, can you scale this thing? And now I'm one of the chronic users of the app and the platform, especially for groceries.
- [44:14]
B
You have an incredible memory. I was sitting right here last. We were looking out at this, like, lovely. At this lovely lunch. And to be fair, it's a hard, it's a hard problem. Like, it is a very hard problem to crack. It's a hard problem as you think about partnering with these grocers who have tons of capabilities and very complex systems. And how do you get supply integrated? How do you pass inventory feeds once you get the inventory feeds, how do I show you 50,000 items from your local ralph on an iPhone app? That's like a hard problem. How do I render those things quickly and seamlessly? If you search for something with a spelling mistake, how do I show you the right thing? And then lastly, how do you get the dashboard to go do the thing for you? And so these are really hard problems and we never trivialize them, but we were always committed to solving them. And so I think the big thing in my mind is that we are, we're here in grocery. We're excited and honored to be able to partner with retailers that we all grew up with that feed America and the world every single day. And that's the thing that we want to continue leaning into. I think the second thing is that we want to be a partner for growth. I kind of alluded to this earlier, but we want, we want to help brands and retailers grow. And so as you think about DoorDash, think about DoorDash not just as a delivery platform, which is what we're largely known for today, but what we would love to be known for is a growth partner. So come to us with your ideas, Come to us with your complaints about how we can be better. That's honestly how DoorDash improves. As we think about, again, where we've been at our best, it's brands and retailers and restaurants and grocers telling us, I've got this problem I'd like to solve. And we thrive on that type of problem. And yeah, we're excited about the momentum, we're excited about the work that we've been able to do. And we feel like we're just getting started.
- [45:58]
C
Congratulations to you. Congratulations to Toby. I actually remember that dialogue pretty well. And you have answered in the best way one possibly could, which is actually delivering a platform that's meaningful, fast growing and actually as you said it, feeding customers at the end of the day. So thank you for this terrific conversation. Let me thank our audience for listening to this wonderful episode. Of course, do leave us a reading and a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify or your favorite listening platform. Do listen to a new every Tuesday episode. The third. Third episode of the week. Yeah, believe it or not, we do three episodes a week. The Weekly Commerce Rift by Peter and Sri. It's the short 10 minute platform. It's built for LinkedIn. You see the video on LinkedIn as well. We pick newsworthy articles for the week and that's where we announce it. And of course leave us a reading or review because it informs us how we are doing as well as if we're having the right conversations like we did with Fouad today. To all of you, I want to thank you sincerely, both from Peter and me. You make the show happen to all our sponsors, whether this podcast, our parties, events, hosted dinners, having us panels. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Without you, the CPG Guys don't exist. F thank you for making time to do this right after Grocery Shop. This was fabulous. Thank you for joining me.
- [47:12]
B
Thanks sri.
- [47:12]
C
Appreciate you with that. This is a wrap of this episode of the CPG Guys.
- [47:28]
A
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