Postmates launches grocery service, scheduled deliveries and revamped app

Postmates has always offered grocery delivery as part of its ethos of delivering anything to you within your city on-demand. Now, Postmates is taking things a step further by baking in a grocery-specific service into its newly revamped app. With Postmates Fresh, which the company has been testing in San Francisco for the last few weeks, people can order groceries via local partners for delivery in 30 minutes or less.

“I’ve used Instacart, GoodEggs and other services, but there’s something magical when I ordered groceries my first time on Postmates,” Postmates Consumer Product Lead David Byttow told me over the phone. “I didn’t have to schedule it. It just came immediately.”

Postmates Fresh works in partnership with various local grocers in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles — the three markets in which Postmates Fresh is currently available. Working with local partners, Postmates says, enables them to offer curated lists of locally-sourced groceries while the revamped app lends itself to making Postmates grocery offerings more prominent.

“Before, it didn’t feel like it was woven in,” Byttow said. “With the new update, it’s certainly more front and center.”

The revamped app also features a new collections view and scheduled deliveries. With scheduled deliveries, you can place a future order even if the restaurant is closed. Or, if you know you want your burrito delivered to your house after work, you can place the order in the morning and set the delivery to arrive by 6:30pm.

Byttow, formerly of Secret and Bold, joined Postmates with his co-founder Ben South Lee in June as part of an acqui-hire. Byttow is in charge of product at Postmates while Lee is in charge of design.

“Part of this whole exercise, especially with this team, we needed to touch every piece of it and rebuild the foundation and build out that vision of really unlocking the city,” Byttow said.

This new design, Byttow said, will lend itself to “a whole bunch of things we’ll be launching and bringing in the coming weeks.” When I asked Byttow to be more specific, he told me I’ll have to wait and see.