FreshDirect, the Northeast’s leading online fresh food grocer, announced the opening of its FreshDirect Campus (FDC), a brand new state-of-the-art facility in New York City’s South Bronx community.
This facility reimagines farm-to-fork food distribution and manufacturing, which will provide even higher-quality, fresher food for customers. It also enables the company to add thousands of new products and accelerate its expansion into new geographies with its FreshDirect, FoodKick and FreshDirect At The Office brands.
The food facility is equipped with robotic pick towers, smart routing technologies, and nine miles of conveyor belts. To deliver on FreshDirect’s commitment to sustainability, the new facility is environmentally friendly and highly energy efficient, and additionally enables FreshDirect to transition from cardboard delivery boxes to recyclable bags. There will also be less food waste through a combined approach of innovation and community outreach.
“The launch of the FreshDirect Campus is the culmination of 16 years of learnings that have enabled us to reinvent the grocery industry with customer experience, food quality, and sustainability at its core,” said FreshDirect CEO and co-founder Jason Ackerman. “This marks a pivotal moment for our business, while positioning us for future growth. We can also better serve the community by providing greater access to fresh food and significantly reducing food waste, cardboard use, and energy consumption. We are thrilled to officially be a part of the Bronx community and are very thankful for the local support we’ve received throughout this journey.”
FreshDirect has made strategic investments in key areas of the new facility. Key initiatives and investments include:
•The FDC has temperature-controlled areas designed to best handle and store meat, seafood, produce, deli, bakery, and prepared food items along with a specific freezer room for ice cream and refrigerated rooms for bananas, tomatoes, and onions to make sure each item is in optimal food condition.
•Launching of an internal quality control app, titled FDQC, to better monitor, track and widely share daily quality ratings of every fresh item, enabled by real-time inspection decisions.
•One refrigerated central food facility uses significantly less energy to protect the cold chain and ensures a huge fossil fuel reduction compared to retail brick-and-mortar operations.
•The FDC is equivalent to 50 grocery stores, and due to its centralized location, provides a more efficient means to reallocate perishables to FreshDirect’s partners City Harvest and the Food Bank for New York City in the fight against hunger.
•As a top food donor to City Harvest, FreshDirect has donated more than 19 million pounds of nutritious food to date—representing 16 million meals—to help feed New Yorkers in need across the five boroughs.
See www.freshdirect.com or www.foodkick.com to learn more.