FreshDirect gets cooking with their move to Criteo’s Retail Media Platform

A proactive plan, a solid partnership, and flawless execution leads to strong success.

FreshDirect is a proud pioneer of the online grocery delivery services category – paving the way for bringing the best in fresh food to consumers’ homes and offices. Established in 2002 in New York City, FreshDirect provides grocery delivery to across the New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. metro areas. Grounded by a mission to make great food easy to get, every facet of FreshDirect’s business model places consumers front and center – from seamless web/app experiences to convenient home deliveries.

As a long time Criteo client, FreshDirect decided to transition to Criteo’s new Retail Media Platform to take advantage of expanded inventory and numerous brand partner benefits. The Northeast’s leading online grocer worked with the Criteo team to prioritize three key areas to ensure transition success:

• Increased placements
• Expanded referral program
• Pre-selling to new and existing brands

Harnessing revenue-driving placement opportunities

Placement expansion was at the core of FreshDirect’s transition, across all devices. New placement opportunities included browse, product detail page (PDP), deals and reorder pages. Within weeks, the new reorder page placements rose to the second-highest revenue generating placement, at 20% of total revenue.

Driving referral program expansion through building stronger partner relationships

FreshDirect increased their focus on their existing referral program, using their strong relationships with their brand partners. Integrating the Criteo sales team into the process, highlighting the platform as a core program in sales materials, and passing leads to Criteo to complete the sales process all contributed to success. Referred sales grew from single digits to 12% of total sales, and smaller accounts saw similar increases.

Pre-selling to new and existing brands

Fueled by data-rich insights, new placement opportunities, the strong referral program, and consistent collaboration with the FreshDirect team, Criteo was able to pre-sell both new and existing brands. These advertisers were impressed with the platform’s core benefits of transparency, flexibility and control, but also the impressive Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), relatively lower competition, and guarantees of performance thanks to FreshDirect’s pure-play ecommerce strategy. New brands advertising on the site grew more than double, and the top 10 brands grew their investment by more than 150%.

Following FreshDirect’s transition to Criteo’s Retail Media Platform, most of FreshDirect’s brand partners ramped up investment in the following quarter. Results over the 18 months that followed were impressive, with 167% YOY sales growth, more than double the number of brands advertising, and strong growth in referrals and new placements. That’s performance that looks delicious.