Would-Be FreshDirect Rival Focuses on Community

Queens entrepreneur Ilya Zeldin says New Yorkers are hungry for a new online grocery store that also allows them to share recipes and dialogue with other shoppers.

After 18 months of planning, Mr. Zeldin, a 32-year-old business school graduate, started a Long Island City-based business, Bread-n-Brie, which combines food delivery services similar to those of FreshDirect and social networking opportunities of sites such as Facebook. "The idea is to build a community, where food shopping is just one part of the community," he said.

On the site, customers can get store credit for sharing their favorite recipes, and chat with other customers on the site's "BnBuzz!" message board. Adding to its community-building theme, Bread-n-Brie posts the photographs, names, and biographies of its 20-person delivery staff — and asks customers to rate their "delivery experience."

In the two weeks since Bread-n-Brie launched, about 500 New Yorkers have registered at breadnbrie.com, and the company has been delivering about a dozen orders to New Yorkers living on the Upper East Side, in Greenwich Village, and in Long Island City, the company's pilot neighborhoods. Mr. Zeldin said Bread-n-Brie would ultimately expand its delivery zones to include the Upper West Side, Chelsea, and Park Slope, among other city neighborhoods.

Bread-n-Brie's two delivery trucks now make just three stops in Manhattan — two on the Upper East Side, and one downtown — and then dispatches its pushcart-wielding staffers, called "BnButlers" to hand out the packages on foot. Mr. Zeldin said he hopes this policy will appeal to eco-friendly New Yorkers because it reduces the impact of traffic, noise, and pollution.

FreshDirect, whose delivery trucks are a city staple, began making deliveries nearly five years ago, boasts 100,000-plus regular New York-area customers, and has fulfilled more than 5 million orders to date, according to data provided by a FreshDirect spokeswoman.

"We already have a benchmark, and the benchmark is high — no doubt about it — but people have nothing to lose by trying something new," Mr. Zeldin said

Bread-n-Brie's prices are fairly comparable to FreshDirect, though it does not offer value packs like FreshDirect.

In the low-margin grocery delivery market, however, FreshDirect has been a notable exception in a field of many failed contenders, such as Shoplink.com, Urbanfetch.com, Kozmo.com, and Webvan, the latter of which blew through $1 billion before filing for bankruptcy in 2001.

Mr. Zeldin knows first-hand the risks associated with start-up. He said his own dot-com start-up, netbaitinc.com, which focused on intellectual property protection, is now dormant. But he said he was confident Bread-n-Brie's focus on community-building and its eco-friendly delivery policies would win over customers, whom he contends love the convenience of grocery delivery but are not particularly loyal to any one company.

As a teenager in 1990, Mr. Zeldin said he immigrated to Queens from Moscow — and went on to earn degrees from Forest Hills High School, the State University of New York at Stonybrook — now known as Stonybrook University — and from the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He said he appreciates New York's idiosyncrasies, its demanding clientele, and its "little gems," such as family-owned markets and bakeries.

While Bread-n-Brie buys its nonperishable goods from a Queens supermarket, it procures specialty items from mom-and-pop shops throughout the city.

"It'll help us get to people's doors that we wouldn't get to otherwise," an owner of a Queens organic market that supplies Bread-n-Brie, Steve Zoumbrakis. said. Mr. Zoumbrakis said he was confident that his market, Fresh Start, would able to keep up with supply as demand increases due to Bread-n-Brie's business.

Other suppliers include Astoria Seafood and Parisi Brothers Bakery in Queens, and the Hunts Point Terminal Produce Market in the Bronx. "This is the city that's so diverse, where you can find all different flavors," Mr. Zeldin said. "This is a city that openly tells you what it thinks."