In May 2011, just weeks after raising $138 million in financing from investors including Goldman Sachs (GS) and scoring a valuation of "roughly $1 billion," Gilt Groupe unveiled its latest sale site, Gilt Taste.

    Foodies celebrated the return of Ruth Reichl, who had been forced to abdicate her throne as editor in chief of Condé Nast's Gourmet when the magazine folded in November 2009. With Reichl as editorial advisor, Gilt promised a site offering "artisanal hard-to-find foods" for ethical eaters with limited access to such products -- e.g. "people who live outside New York City" -- as well as the kind of editorial content that made Reichl famous.

    But unlike the heavily discounted, limited inventory, real-time flash sales that brought New York-style sample sales to the world -- and made Gilt Groupe famous -- Gilt Taste was built to be a self-described "luxury brand," selling high-end food at high-end prices. This model, it turned out, didn't work, and Gilt Taste quietly folded on May 24 this year.

    But as a bevy of established, growing, and up-and-coming food-tech startups are making clear, Gilt Taste's failure is not proof that local food economies can't get a piece of the $225 billion e-commerce industry. It is a sign, though, that selling food online is different than peddling designer handbags, and understanding those differences is key to success.

What went wrong at Gilt?

    There are a number of explanations for Gilt Taste's demise, as well as failed e-commerce food sites like Webvan, an early online grocery startup, and Foodzie, an online food marketplace and subscription service.

    The very nature of food, at least as the food movement envisions it, is directly at odds with the startup model. No farm, city, region, or state is going to have the same local food system, so scaling can't be computed with a simple -- or even not so simple -- algorithm. Patrice Perkins, owner of Lifestyle Zen, a law firm for creative entrepreneurs including food-tech startups, sees this as a common misunderstanding among tech types looking to jump into the food space. "You have a team of talented programmers and creative people, and if you have the right team in place, you literally can get something from ideation to execution overnight." But, she adds, very often, "there's not enough market research to really make sure there's a need for the product that you offer."

    Gilt faced other challenges as well. Despite its respectable site traffic -- averaging 100,000 unique visitors every month -- editorial content did not translate into high sales. A foodie may happily gorge herself on articles about new salts or the best prosciutto, but that doesn't mean she is going to buy those products. Unlike groceries, artisanal foods are generally considered a niche market. They make great gifts, as well as delicious occasional treats, but most people -- even foodies -- aren't buying high-end truffle oil too often. And the customers who are in the market for these products are usually buying them somewhere they can see, smell, and taste the goods first: at the farmers market, at Whole Foods, or at the artisan's own brick-and-mortar shop.

    2011年5月，电商网站Gilt Groupe推出了旗下最新的销售网站——美食网站Gilt Taste。就在此前数周，Gilt Groupe刚刚从包括高盛集团（Goldman Sachs）在内的投资者手中筹集到1.38亿美元的投资资金，此轮融资给予该公司的估值大约为10亿美元。

    当时，美食家们都在庆祝露丝•雷切尔的回归。2009年11月，康泰纳仕公司（Condé Nast）关闭了旗下的《美食家》杂志（Gourmet），雷切尔被迫放弃了杂志主编的宝座。聘请雷切尔担任评论顾问的Gilt承诺，美食网站Gilt Taste为饮食伦理主义者（指一个人仅食用符合一定道德准则的食物,特别是有机食品和人道饲养的肉类、家禽和鱼类——译者注）提供“难以找到的手工食物”（他们获得这些食物的机会有限）——比如“住在纽约市以外地区的人”，同时提供给雷切尔带来名望的那类评论内容。

    Gilt Groupe赖以成名的是大幅打折而限量库存的实时闪购模式，借此把纽约风格的样品销售带到全世界。跟它不同的是，Gilt Taste自称建立的目的是成为一个 “奢侈品牌”，以高端价格销售高端食品。然而这个模式并没有奏效，今年5月24日，Gilt Taste悄然停业了。

    但正如一批已经成立、正在增长以及前景有望的食品-科技初创公司所表明的那样，Gilt Taste的失败并不能证明地方食品经济无法在年销售额高达2,250亿美元的电子商务产业中分到一杯羹。然而，Gilt Taste的滑铁卢的确表明，在线销售食品与兜售名牌手袋完全不同，而理解这些差异至关重要。

Gilt犯了什么错误？

    Gilt Taste的消亡，以及诸如早期在线食品杂货零售初创公司Webvan和在线食品市场与订付服务网站Foodzie等电子商务网站的失败存在多方面的原因。

    食品的根本特性——至少食品电商运动所理解的食品特性，是直接与其初创模式不一致的。任何农场、城市、地区或国家，都不会有相同的地方食品体系，因此相关标准无法以一种简单——或者甚至不是那么简单——的算法来加以估算。Lifestyle Zen是一家为包括食品-科技初创公司在内的创新企业家提供服务的律师事务所。这家律师事务所的老板帕特里斯•帕金斯认为这是期望进军食品领域的技术型人才当中普遍存在的一个误解。“大家认为，只要拥有一个能干的程序员团和创意人才，找到合适的团队，差不多很快就可以把某个创意从构思阶段推进到执行阶段。”但是，她进一步表示，很多时候，“人们并没有进行充分的市场调研，无法真正保证自己所提供的产品一定有市场需求。”

    Gilt当时还面临着其他挑战。尽管它的网站流量颇为可观——平均每月吸引10万名独立访问者，但它的评论内容并没有拉动销售。美食家可能很乐意如饥似渴地阅读有关新盐或者最美味的意大利熏火腿的文章，但是，这并不意味着她会购买这些产品。与食品杂货不同，手工食品通常被认为是一个利基市场。它们可以作为很不错的礼物，以及偶尔的美味享受，但大多数人——即便是美食家——也不会过于频繁地购买高档松露油。而有意购买这些产品的客户通常会在他们可以看到、闻到以及品尝这些产品的某个地方采购，比如：在农贸市场、在全食超市（Whole Foods），或者在食品手工制作者自己的实体店。

    With notoriously low profit margins, any food-based business is going to face the built-in challenge of showing a healthy bottom line. That was the reason Gilt Groupe gave in September 2012 when it announced it would be cutting back Taste's offerings. Gilt did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

    The special challenges of bringing artisanal food to the masses, however, have not discouraged techies and investors. As the June launch of Amazon's grocery service, AmazonFresh (AMZN), in L.A. -- expanding a service it had piloted in Seattle in 2007 -- makes clear, as well as the proven success of FreshDirect, which says it had 2012 revenues over $400 million and that the business has been turning a profit for the past few years.

    Amazon brought in Webvan alum to learn from the startup's failures, while FreshDirect CMO John Leeman attributes the company's growth to convenience and quality. While online shopping is "fundamentally a convenience business," it's the company's "overkill in the quality area" that keeps its customers returning, he claims. "The high quality and trust in the sourcing," Leeman says, "is what our business model is anchored on."

All about distribution

    There's another special problem for a business trying to sell food: distribution. According to Danielle Gould, founder of research firm Food+Tech Connect, it's the most difficult part of creating a viable business model. "That's where so many people have failed."

    Besides the typical distribution requirements -- warehouses, trucks, labor -- food has a perishability component. "That adds levels of complexity and constraints on delivery for companies, particularly as they scale," she says. "As you start to grow and as demand grows, you're a distribution company, a fulfillment company," so if you can't keep up, you won't survive.

    Good Eggs, a San Francisco-based online farmers market led by tech veterans Rob Spiro (a co-founder of Aardvark, which sold itself to Google (GOOG) for $50 million in 2010) and Alon Savant (co-founder of software design company, Carbon Five), came to the same conclusion. After tinkering with a number of ways to deliver local food "the last mile" to their customers, they eventually built their own infrastructure to bring groceries right to their Bay Area clientele's doorsteps. However, unlike FreshDirect, which buys food in bulk and then sells it to customers, Good Eggs built a logistics platform for artisans and farmers to sell their food directly to customers. By working with producers to design their own online sales platforms, the Good Eggs team is able to cater to different food producers' needs in a way that Gilt Taste simply wasn't set up to handle.

    "What's cool about it is that it feels like an online grocery, in that you order exactly what you want and you get a home delivery. But it's actually structured extremely differently," Spiro says. The approach also removes the perishability and waste components from the system. "Everything that is brought to our warehouse has already been bought and made for a customer. So at the end of every day our warehouse is empty."

    鉴于利润率出了名的低，任何以食品为主业的企业都将面临着一个固有的挑战，那就是拿出健康的资产负债表。这就是Gilt Groupe在2012年9月份宣布削减Gilt Taste所提供的产品数量时所给出的原因。Gilt没有回应笔者为撰写本文而提出的置评请求。

    然而，将手工食品推介给普通民众所面临的诸多特殊挑战并没有让技术型人才和投资者望而却步。亚马逊（Amazon）今年6月份将自己于2007年在西雅图试点的食品杂货服务AmazonFresh扩大到洛杉矶，加上在线食品零售商FreshDirect已证实获得的成功，这些都明确证明了上面这一点。FreshDirect表示，该公司2012年营收超过4亿美元，而且在过去几年里就已经实现了盈利。

    亚马逊之前收购了Webvan，目的在于从这家初创公司的失败中吸取经验和教训，而FreshDirect首席营销官约翰•利曼则将该公司的业绩增长归功于服务便利和食品质量。他声称，虽然在线购物“从根本上说就是一项便利业务”，但FreshDirect争取回头客的杀手锏是自身“在食品质量方面的超强竞争力”。利曼说：“在采购中力求食品质量以及信任，正是我们经营模式扎根的基础所在。”

关键在于配送

    试图销售食品的公司还面临一个特殊的问题：配送。据市场研究公司Food+Tech Connect创始人达尼埃尔•古尔德认为，这是创建一个可行的商业模式最困难的部分。“很多人就是栽在了这上面。”

    除了通常的配送要求——仓库、货车、劳动力之外，食品还容易腐烂。 她说：“它增加了公司配送的复杂程度以及约束因素，尤其是当它们扩大经营规模的时候。随着业务开始增长，需求增长，你便成为一家配送公司，一家订单履行公司”，所以如果无法跟上需求增长的步伐，就无法生存下去。

    总部位于旧金山的在线农贸市场Good Eggs也得出了同样的结论。执掌该公司的是科技界老将罗布•斯皮罗【社交问答网站Aardvark的联合创始人，Aardvark在2010年以5,000万美元出售给谷歌（Google）】和阿龙•萨万特（软件设计公司Carbon Five的联合创始人）。他们最开始尝试过不少办法，以便攻克配送的“最后一公里”，向客户提供地方食品，最后才建立了自己的物流基础设施体系，得以把食品杂货配送到旧金山湾区客户的家门口。然而，与批量购买食品然后销售给客户的FreshDirec不同，Good Eggs建立了一个物流平台，让食品手工制造者和农场主通过这个平台把他们的食品直接出售给客户。通过与生产商合作设计他们自己的在线销售平台，Good Eggs团队能够迎合不同食品生产者的需求。而这点，Gilt Taste根本没有做到。

    斯皮罗说：“我们的网站吸引人的地方在于，它感觉像是一个在线食品杂货店。顾客订购自己想要的东西，然后就会有人送货上门。但它实际上在结构安排上完全不同。”这个方法还从配送体系中消除了易腐和浪费因素。“进入我们仓库的所有东西都是顾客已经付过钱的，为顾客制作的。因此，每天结束营业后，我们的仓库都是空荡荡的。”

    The company is currently on its ninth iteration, and the latest model seems to be working. Good Eggs is expanding. It's got operations in Brooklyn and New Orleans, with Los Angeles next in line.

    Distribution is key to FreshDirect's profitability as well. Unlike regular grocers, whose reliance on multiple middlemen can lead to spoilage and waste, FreshDirect uses one, temperature-controlled distribution center to cut the amount of wasted food. According to Leeman, this model allows the company "to pay a fair price to farmers and charge consumers a fair price for superior quality fresh food and be more profitable than other grocery models."

    So are former Gilt Taste shoppers out of luck when it comes to buying specialty, non-perishable food items online, if they don't live in an area with FreshDirect, Good Eggs, or a similar business? Not quite. Delicious Karma, which launched in August 2012 and offers nationwide delivery, may be poised to fill that gap. Like Gilt Taste did, it offers curated, hard-to-find food, but it's balancing such items with day-to-day necessities and operating with lower overhead costs.

    And by adding a social media component to food shopping, for example with its Pinterest-like Craves board, Delicious Karma co-founder Michelle Ritchie is trying to capitalize on the social nature of food itself. "Food is something that people share," she says. "When we entertain, see our friends, and socialize, food is always such a big part of that." Whether the site's current 6,000 members will share it enough to escape Gilt Taste's fate, though, is unclear.

    这家公司目前正在运行其第九版运营系统，而最新的模式似乎运行良好。Good Eggs正在扩张。该公司已在布鲁克林和新奥尔良运营，下一步将扩张到洛杉矶。

    配送也是FreshDirect盈利能力的关键。与普通的食品杂货店（它们依靠多家中间商，从而可能导致食品腐坏和浪费问题 ）不同，FreshDirect使用一个温控的配送中心，以此减少食品浪费量。据利曼称，这种模式使该公司能够“在采购优质生鲜食品时向农场主支付一个公平的价格，而在销售时则向消费者收取一个合理的价格，同时还能确保赚到比其他食品杂货销售模式更高的利润。”

    因此，就在线购买非易腐特色食品而言，以前在Gilt Taste购物的消费者如果不住在FreshDirect、Good Eggs或类似公司的服务覆盖区域，他们就无福消受了吗？不完全如此。2012年8月推出、并在全美提供配送的社交食品购物网站Delicious Karma可能随时准备填补这一空白。和Gilt Taste一样，这家网站提供难以找到的精选食品，但它用日常必需品与这些精选食品达成均衡，并以较低的营运成本进行运营。

    同时，Delicious Karma联合创始人米歇尔•里奇正在设法利用食品本身的社交特性，她的做法是在食品购物服务中增加社交媒体元素，比如该网站类似Pinterest的渴望告示板（Craves board）。她说：“食物是人们用以分享的东西。我们款待客人，走访朋友，进行社交活动时，食品总是其中一个重要组成部分。”然而，这个网站目前的6,000名成员对这个理念的认同程度是否能足以保证该公司避免遭遇Gilt Taste的停业厄运？这个问题目前还不明朗。（财富中文网）

    翻译: iDo98