Last we heard from Good Eggs, it was in a multi-city retreat. Now it’s expanding with $100m in funding

But it soon ran into more than a few roadblocks: customer churn, high margins, and complicated delivery logistics. Shoppers were also slow to adopt such services, in part through unfamiliarity and unease – feeling funny about someone else fondling their avocados, for example. But the pandemic boost for tech-enabled food retail has come too late for many of the first movers.

San Francisco-based Good Eggs is one of the few grocery delivery startups that has been around since the beginning. Not only is it still active; it’s bagging big-name backers, too. “Everybody in online grocery has certainly seen a big tailwind from the large momentum and speed of consumer habit change,” CEO Bentley Hall tells AFN . “I think that accelerated our business.

But even without the pandemic we probably still would have probably secured a similar round this year.” Good Eggs just unveiled a $100 million fundraise led by Glade Brook Capital Partners . GV in addition participated in the round as well as Tao Invest, Finistere Ventures , and Rich’s.

This is its first backing since a $50 million Series C round in 2018. Good Eggs delivers the full range of food products to users including meal kits, prepared foods, alcohol, and flowers.

It in addition delivers “mindfully sourced, absurdly fresh” produce that is harvested within 48 hours of delivery. About 70% of its product range comes from within the Bay Area. While many grocery delivery startups have focused on casting a wide net across the country, Good Eggs has taken a different strategy.

In Hall’s words, good Eggs pivoted to being a food firm instead of a tech business, serving as a one-stop-shop for clients instead of a specialty grocer. It can be hard to make shareholders understand the merits of focusing on one metropolis instead of scaling and expanding as rapidly as possible. Most traditional investors who prefer the latter tactic tend to be a poor fit for Good Eggs anyway, Hall suggested. “It’s a tougher pitch for them, but we are not pitching them,” he stated. “We look for investors who are independent thinkers, who actually care about this category, and who want to build something really big over the next few decades that is interesting.

We are really fortunate to have investors in that camp.” Goldman Sachs predicts the US online grocery delivery trade will reach $150 billion in turnover by 2026, with California’s metropolitan areas accounting for an reckoned 10% to 15% of that figure. Sensing the opportunity, Good Eggs will use its latest financing to grow beyond the Bay Area and rollout into southern California.

The startup claims this move could triple its addressable trade and lead to the creation of up to 1,000 new positions. “We’ve been looking at southern California for a long time, including Los Angeles, Orange County, and northern San Diego. Those zip codes are about two to three-times larger by population than the San Francisco Bay Area,” Hall told reporters.

The plan is to open one or more fulfillment centers to serve the region. Good Eggs will as well spend some of the money on improving customer experience.