Agricool Strawberries, Coming To Monoprix 🚀

Co-Founder and CEO, Agricool

February 16, 2017

So now that our direct sales have been going on for 4 months (jeez, already?!), it’s time for us to step up to the next challenge: getting our strawberries into the fruit and vegetable aisles in your grocery stores. The goal is to find the model that will let us make our fruits and vegetables accessible to everyone, across the whole world. Let’s go! Here’s where we are.

A New Model

Today we have 4 Cooltainers in Paris (Bercy, Station F, Stade de France, Halle Flachat). Each of them can produce 7 tons of strawberries per year, which is about 28,000 cartons. That gives us a current total production of roughly 112,000 cartons every year. Tomorrow, we’ll have thousands of Cooltainers around the world. The number of cartons won’t be counted in the thousands, but in the millions. And when that happens, we need to have found the right way to sell them easily, efficiently, and at scale.

To make it all work, best to get started right now. The facts are simple: more than 70% of French people buy their fruits and vegetables in a supermarket or hypermarket. In other words, if we want to build a new agricultural model that gives everyone access to better fruits and vegetables, we need to figure out how to sell there. And so we’re about to take our first steps down the grocery stores aisle.

Everybody to Monoprix 🍓

For our first store event (🎉🎉🎉), we chose to go to Monoprix. Why? The store’s mission has been the same since they opened their first store in 1932: “Bringing the best to everyone, in the middle of the city”. It’s pretty close to ours, no? What’s more, they’ve recently decided to go even further. More than just offering “the best” products, they’ve started a brand of “Made in pas très loin” (“Made not far away”) to encourage local production. Awesome! And if we could get even closer? What if we had the label reading “Made in very very close, in a paradise for fruits and vegetables right in the heart of the city”?

For us, it’s an incredible opportunity to discover the world of in-store sales. What do we know for sure? Our recipe will stay the same (❤️) and we’ll be preparing for the next steps. Our strawberries will always be harvested that morning by our Cooltivators. This time, they’ll be dropped off in the closest store and displayed in a case specially made by us, just for this purpose, everything done in order for them to be sold that very day. And if you arrive around 10am, you’ll probably cross paths with Charlotte or Georges (our Cooltivators), there to drop off the day’s cartons. And then there’ll be nothing left to do but taste the berries.

Laura and Charlotte, ready for this new challenge !

Test & Learn 💡

We’re the first to sell strawberries produced in the heart of the city, without any pesticides and harvested that morning in order to be eaten that day, on Parisian fruits and vegetables aisles. That means that we need to learn a ton about the current sales model as well as everything that we could potentially invent. It’s an incredible challenge!

How will it work, concretely? We’ll tackle it like all of our subjects: by trying it, testing it, proving it. The sum total of what we need to learn is huge. From packaging to the display to the branding to in-store events, we have thousands of things to discover. Then once we’ve understood your expectations and how we can best respond to them, we’ll be able to dream even bigger (🚀). And that’s good, because with more than 325 Monoprix stores in the Paris region, we can move step-by-step to deploy our model further and get our strawberries to everyone in Paris.

The team, looking for the perfect place for our strawberries ✌

So…see you there? 🙂

Come by on Saturday, February 17 at Monoprix (2 Rue de la Station, 92600 Asnières-sur-Seine) to be part of the first in-store adventure.

Agricool Strawberries, Coming To Monoprix 🚀