Grocery Gateway

Grocery Gateway
Subsidiary
Industry Online retailer
Founded 1997 in Toronto, Ontario
Founders Bill Di Nardo
Scott Bryan
Stephen Tallevi
Tomas Berinstein
Ben Jones
Alan Lamb
Headquarters Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Areas served
 Greater Toronto Area
Oakville
Burlington
Tri-Cities
Parent Longo's

Grocery Gateway is a grocery delivery service based in Ontario and serves the entire Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Grocery Gateway was the brainchild of Toronto entrepreneur Bill Di Nardo, who along with co-founders Scott Bryan, Stephen Tallevi, Tomas Berinstein, Ben Jones, and Alan Lamb, started the company in late 1997. Over the next several years Grocery Gateway would raise over $100 million in financing and at its peak employed over 600 people.

Since August 25, 2004, Grocery Gateway has been operated by Longo Brothers Fruit Market Incorporated.

Grocery Gateway's started by picking their orders from Longo's stores around the GTA but outgrew the stores in 1999 and acquired warehouse and office space in Mississauga. Within 12 months of operations in the new facility it became clear they would need more space and signed a lease at the Downsview property in Toronto.

Grocery Gateway grew slowly at the start. Boot strapped by the early group, Di Nardo and Bryan wrote the first cheques to get the business going. The original advisory board included John Geci, Pat MacGinnis and Gary Potter. The team approached a number of independent grocers around Toronto to be their supply partner. Anthony Longo and his team stepped forward and were exceptional partners. They provided access to the stores for the team to take pictures of all of the products, record the relevant information and start to build "picking route maps". Eventually the stores were transformed into distribution centres at night where hundreds of orders were picked and packed. Eight Longo's stores were used at the peak of store based picking before the group moved to the warehouse in Mississauga.

In 1999, the team started looking for capital to help accelerate the business. There were similar businesses in the U.S. that had started to get funding like HomeGrocer, Webvan, Streamline and Peapod. Eventually, with the help of Bob Shoniker, Grocery Gateway received early signs of interest from Rocco Rossi and Tony Brown at Torstar. With momentum building and deliveries actually picking up, other Canadian VC firms took interest in the company. The first financing round would eventually be completed with Vern Lobo (Mosaic Venture Partners), Stuart Lombard, Osama Araft and John Albright (Albright Ventures) and Sophie Forest (Sofinov - a Caisse de Depot division). The first major raise was closed at over $30 million.

Around the time of the first VC financing Claude Germain joined the team as Chief Operating Officer. Claude was familiar to some of the VCs as a Harvard MBA alum and former BCG consultant. Di Nardo and Bryan played rugby with Claude at the Balmy Beach Rugby Club, which would become the source of a number of future Grocery Gateway employees.

Claude drove the design of the first major facility with the help of Giffels Engineering and Jim Rutherford who was the project manager for the build phase.

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