Extreme value grocery store with unusual model joins the fray

JULY 10, 2016 | BY MARIANNE WILSON

A new player has entered the value grocery segment.

  

LogicLane, a start-up company that provides discount wholesale grocery supply chain services and a wholesale grocery e-commerce marketplace for businesses, has entered the retail arena, opening a supermarket in Uniontown, Pennsylvania.  

   

Called Mill Street Merchants, the store is designed to extend the extreme value deals previously only available to national businesses on the LogicLane website to local businesses and consumers.

   

"Our Mill Street Merchants business model is simple," said Patrick Esposito, CEO at LogicLane and Mill Street Merchants. "Tons of great food gets lost in the distribution cycle and goes to waste. Mill Street Merchants helps to eliminate food waste by finding groceries at huge discounts and, then, passing these extreme discounts onto our customers – both businesses and consumers.”

    

Anything that doesn't get purchased quickly at Mill Street Merchants or online at LogicLane.com gets donated to local charities for use, Esposito added.

   

The National Resources Defense Council published an issue paper which indicated that over 40% of the U.S. food supply is wasted, with a significant portion lost in the distribution cycle due to inefficient models and mechanisms to support non-traditional delivery of food and beverage products into the marketplace. LogicLane (and Mill Street Merchants) target the roughly $40 billion of food waste that occurs between food producers, food distributors and retailers.  

   

"Mill Street Merchants specializes in finding products that are outside of the normal retail distribution process to bring extreme values and amazing deals to customers and, in the process, help to stop food waste," said John Gabriel Sr., chief marketing officer at LogicLane and Mill Street Merchants.