GrubMarket Acquires Butter to Strengthen its AI-Powered Software Capabilities for American Food Supply Chain
GrubMarket this week announced that it has completed the acquisition of San Francisco, CA-based Butter, a VC-backed food wholesale software operating system designed to become the modern system of record for food distribution. GrubMarket will leverage Butter’s AI-powered e-commerce and payments technologies to expand its suite of innovative, AI-powered solutions designed for food supply chain industry, as well as to enhance the functionality of its existing portfolio of cutting-edge software products including GrubAssist AI and WholesaleWare and to solidify its position as the enterprise AI solution provider for America’s food supply chain industry.
Founded in 2020 by machine learning experts Winston Chi and Shangyan Li, Butter’s modular software product suite includes several key offerings, including: AI-powered, omnichannel sales empowerment tools for automating repetitive, manual order entry; a cloud-based ERP with real-time inventory monitoring, customer relationship management and order management; a mobile and web-enabled e-commerce solution for handling online orders; as well as a fully-integrated online payment solution.
Today, Butter has a network of more than 11,000 buyers and works with dozens of foodservice, restaurant and grocery customers, processes hundreds of thousands of orders annually and facilitates hundreds of millions of dollars in transaction volume across its platform. After the acquisition, Butter will continue to be managed by Chi and Li, alongside their mission-driven team of seasoned engineers with extensive experience in process-heavy products, ML applications and foodservice distribution.
“The Butter team is incredibly passionate about helping food wholesale distributors better run their businesses by building software and AI that help them grow sales, streamline operations and deliver excellent products and services, without drowning in manual tasks like repetitive phone calls and messy spreadsheet data entry,” said Winston Chi, co-founder of Butter. “We were keen to join forces with GrubMarket, who shares our passion for being an AI-powered technology enabler and digital transformer to drive meaningful change for the food supply chain industry. GrubMarket’s sterling reputation in the industry precedes them, and we are excited to work together to further GrubMarket’s efforts, particularly around enterprise AI, to revolutionize the food supply chain industry through transformative technologies.”
“We are thrilled to welcome Butter and its formidable engineering team to the GrubMarket family,” said Mike Xu, CEO of GrubMarket. “We have known about Butter for a little while now and are impressed with their ability to leverage advanced AI to build unique software applications that are highly complementary to our WholesaleWare and GrubAssist AI products. In addition, while GrubMarket has worked predominantly with customers in the fresh produce and meat categories, Winston, Shangyan and team have built a strong customer base in other specialty food industries, including seafood. We care deeply about the food supply chain industry as a whole and want to do everything we can to empower all players in this space to leverage technology to run their businesses better. The Butter team shares our passion, and we are excited to collaborate with them to bolster our AI-powered software offerings as we continue to simplify, digitalize and supercharge the food supply chain.”
In addition to activating new products in the GrubMarket AI suite, Butter’s AI-powered e-commerce and payments technologies will also be integrated into GrubMarket’s proprietary, AI-powered ERP software, WholesaleWare, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that provides food industry wholesalers and distributors with seamless financial management, powerful sales support, online ordering, precise inventory management, lot traceability, grower accounting and automated routing and logistics; GrubAssist AI, GrubMarket’s groundbreaking enterprise AI assistant that empowers food supply chain businesses with deep insights and intelligent analysis; and Orders IO, GrubMarket’s custom branded, mobile e-commerce solution.