Statewide shutdowns to contain the coronavirus have ramped up the pressure on direct-to-consumer startups delivering groceries. Here's how Misfits Market is scrambling to meet a 300% surge in demand.

Reuters

• Online grocery startups have experienced a massive influx of customer growth as state-wide lockdowns and social distancing measures have turned their services from convenient to essential- a bright spot among the broader troubles facing the direct-to-consumer industry during the coronavirus outbreak.
• Misfits Market, a direct-to-consumer startup delivering fresh produce, has scrambled to meet a whopping 300% growth in customers, working around the clock to ensure that inventory and logistics can meet an unprecedented surge in demand amid the coronavirus crisis.
• It's a challenging time that has forced the company to work around the clock for the past two weeks, Misfits Market CEO Abhi Ramesh told Business Insider. The company's warehouse associates, packing boxes on the frontlines, have been especially under pressure.
• "There are people actually relying on us to get fresh produce and other foods to their doorstep," Ramesh said. "There's a level of pressure that comes with that."
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

It's not just grocery stores whose reserves are being tested.

Amazon and Instacart are facing unprecedented surges in orders. So are online-essentials startups delivering groceries straight to consumers, as state-wide lockdowns and social distancing measures have turned their services from convenient to essential.

But while their success has been a bright spot in the broader troubles facing the direct-to-consumer industry, the coronavirus outbreak has also ramped up the pressure on them to meet the demand and scale its services without a hitch.

Misfits Market, a direct-to-consumer startup offering boxes of fruits and veggies to subscribing customers each week, has seen a dramatic surge in customers - a growth of over 300% per day, compared to previous weeks, Misfits Market CEO Abhi Ramesh told Business Insider in an interview.

But the challenges are many: not only is the company dealing with a massive influx of new customers, but its existing customers are also ordering more quantity and more frequently than before. More warehouse workers need to be hired to ensure that Misfit's veggie boxes are still being sent out on schedule - and they need to be adequately protected and compensated, given they're on the frontlines of the outbreak.

"There are people actually relying on us to get fresh produce and other foods to their doorstep," Abhi Ramesh, CEO of Misfits Market, told Business Insider. "There's a level of pressure that comes with that...everyone from myself down to the folks who are picking and packing boxes in the warehouse, they take that extremely seriously."

It's a series of overwhelming challenges that have forced the Misfits Market leadership team to work around the clock for the past two weeks, putting plans into place and adjusting them to meet a rapidly-changing situation.

"We may try to describe it as super deliberate and planned - maybe some of it was - but 80-90% of it was based off using gut instinct to react to what we were seeing out there," Ramesh added.

Misfits' playbook: Logistics

Because the company sources produce directly from farms, its challenges are slightly different from those facing grocery-delivery services like Instacart, whose food supply chain challenges are handled by local grocery stores.

And as uncertainty around the coronavirus outbreak continues to cloud the future, the company has had to put contingency plans in place to ensure that its produce continues to be transported- both from the farms to its warehouses, and from its warehouses to different customers around the world.

"We're shipping food from all over the country- there's a lot of stuff we're getting here in the Northeast, but we're also shipping stuff out from the West Coast, and from Florida," Ramesh explained.

The company says it's been keeping an eye on the states implementing shelter in place, to gauge whether the new directives affect logistics networks.

"So far, fingers crossed, we haven't been affected by any kind of transportation disruptions. But that's something we've been monitoring constantly, just to make sure," Ramesh said. The company doesn't have its own delivery workers but instead works with a number of third-party delivery services like FedEx.

Misfits' playbook: Staffing

But there has been a need to staff its customer services and warehouses thanks to the boost in demand.

"We hired a ton of new customer service agents, we already hired a ton of the warehouse associates - and we'll be hiring a lot more over the next couple of weeks," Ramesh said. The company hopes to hire around 150 warehouse associates to meet the demands of its new customers.

Misfits' warehouses, located in New Jersey, are deemed "essential services," so they'll be open even as the country fights to contain the coronavirus pandemic. That puts its warehouse workers on the frontlines of the crisis, as they pack boxes of produce to ensure that people stay fed during the crisis.

"The good thing about working in a kind of a food facility is that the baseline level of safety and health is already high- everyone is wearing gloves, hairnets, we have facemasks coming in, we're switching gloves out every couple of hours, and there are sanitizing stations everywhere," Ramesh said. "Some of those measures were already in place by default because we're a food-grade facility; we've just doubled down on those efforts."

Still, the company says it recognizes the additional risk workers have been facing, and has been compensating them accordingly.

"All of our workers here are receiving extra pay, and we were kind of the early ones to do so," Ramesh said, noting that the company was one of the first to implement it, and that it wasn't a "reactionary" measure forced by strikes and protests. Misfits is also covering any sudden additional costs faced by warehouse workers, like transportation or childcare, Ramesh said.

Do you have a personal experience with the coronavirus you'd like to share? Or a tip on how your town or community is handling the pandemic? Please email covidtips@businessinsider.com and tell us your story.

And get the latest coronavirus analysis and research from Business Insider Intelligence on how COVID-19 is impacting businesses.

NOW WATCH: Why bidets are better than buying countless rolls of toilet paper