This Online Grocer Wants To End Food Deserts By Underselling Amazon

Thrive Market sells organic, healthy pantry items at below-market prices. Members pay an annual fee that sponsors another family in need. Thrive Market deliberately sells a narrow range of products. Rather than offering the same hundreds of laundry detergents as Amazon, Thrive Market carries four or five brands that are all non-toxic and as natural as possible. In fact, a product sold by Thrive Market needs to meet 150 quality standards. “Consumers are overloaded and don’t know who to trust,” Lovelace believes. “Discovery [of new products] is really important, but they also want to know that there is some editorial curation in the process.”

Smaller brands like Primal Kitchen, Kettle & Fire, Square Organics, and Epic have launched products with Thrive Market to get early feedback from the company’s customers. “What we hear from these brands is that they feel like they are taken advantage of by the traditional retail system, so they don’t want their products to be as expensive as they are,” Lovelace says…if it’s successful, the model could prove to be an alternative solution to the food-desert problem.

Read the Fast Company article.