Dive Brief:

• Upscale convenience store Foxtrot has launched a national delivery platform to augment its growing fleet of brick-and-mortar locations, the company announced Monday.
• The service, known as Foxtrot Anywhere, offers a range of popular items from the retailer's stores as well as a curated selection of gift boxes featuring food, wine and other products.
• Foxtrot's foray into shipping follows the retailer's announcement last month that it plans to significantly expand its store fleet in multiple U.S. cities. 

Dive Insight:

Foxtrot, which has built its business around neighborhood-focused stores that also offer quick delivery to nearby addresses, is looking to leverage its success in local markets as the foundation for an online operation serving the entire country.

The Chicago-based company's new service offers a limited selection of goods that represent its in-store best-sellers and products it defines as "trending." That approach is distinct from the retailer's existing e-commerce strategy, which permits people living within close proximity to its stores in Chicago, Dallas and Washington, D.C., to get home delivery of its full suite of offerings in an hour or less.

The new service features packages centered on items like made-from-scratch pasta and snacks intended to be consumed with wine, chips and desserts. In a bid to add star power to its marketing, Foxtrot has also enlisted TV personality Nilou Motamed, the former editor of Food & Wine magazine, to help choose products to sell online.

"Foxtrot Anywhere allows our friends all over the country to experience the best of what we discover and love here at Foxtrot," Foxtrot founder and CEO Mike LaVitola said in an emailed statement. "We're excited to now offer the best of the best from our local shops to anyone, no matter where you live."

Foxtrot Anywhere also represents an effort to expand the audience for its locally sourced products. The company uses proprietary software to facilitate working with smaller suppliers and runs a program to encourage local producers to pitch their products, LaVitola said earlier this year during an opening-day tour of the retailer's 3,000-square-foot store in the Georgetown section of the nation's capital. Foxtrot sources about a quarter of the approximately 1,000 SKUs in that store from producers in or near the District of Columbia, according to LaVitola.

In July, Foxtrot announced that it plans to open 50 new stores in the United States during the next two years as it deploys $42 million in new funding it announced earlier in 2021. The new stores, to be located both in its existing three markets as well as in new cities including New York City, Boston, Miami and Los Angeles, will be twice the size of Foxtrot's current locations.