fresh-food
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The Grocery Chain That Built a Moat Out of Being Local
Stater Bros. cannot outscale Walmart or Kroger. Its answer is a dense Southern California network, staffed counters, local memory and the stubborn belief that a grocery store can still feel like part of the neighborhood.
The Red Bag at 100: How Sendik's Made a Moat Out of Knowing Milwaukee
A horse-drawn produce route became a 17-store regional grocer by treating fresh food, helpful people and neighborhood memory as infrastructure. In its centennial year, Sendik's is betting that a red bag can still carry more meaning than a national loyalty card.
How Maverik Turned the Gas Station Into an Adventure Brand
A Wyoming two-pump station became an 818-store retail system by treating every fuel stop like the trailhead to somewhere better. Its real product is not gasoline alone - it is momentum.
Vallarta Supermarkets
A family butcher shop became a regional grocery chain by treating tortillas, carne asada and pan dulce as infrastructure - not ethnic-aisle decoration. Forty years later, Vallarta is carrying that fresh-food system beyond California.
Afresh
Afresh began with a stubborn observation: a strawberry cannot be managed like a cereal box. Its grocery-native AI now helps retailers order, produce and buy across the whole store - turning perishability, imperfect counts and daily uncertainty into decisions people can actually use.
Matt Schwartz
Matt Schwartz is the CEO and co-founder of Afresh, a San Francisco-based AI company building the operating system for fresh food in grocery retail. A Stanford MBA alumnus with a lifelong obsession with food systems, he co-founded Afresh in 2017 after discovering that billion-dollar grocery chains were still managing produce orders with paper and pen. Under his leadership, Afresh has raised $181.8M in total funding, deployed across 12,500+ departments in 40 states, and prevented more than 200 million pounds of food waste - serving major chains including Albertsons, Meijer, and Wakefern.