GrubMarket has completed the acquisition of Butter, a San Francisco-based software company specializing in AI-powered solutions for food wholesalers.
GrubMarket will use Butter’s AI-powered e-commerce and payments technologies to expand its suite of AI-powered solutions designed for the food supply chain industry, as well as to enhance the functionality of its current portfolio of software products, including GrubAssist AI and WholesaleWare.
GrubMarket’s acquisition of Butter will empower the company to leverage Butter’s suite of software solutions, including:
- AI-powered sales tools to automate order processing;
- Cloud-based ERP for inventory management, customer relations and order management;
- Mobile and web e-commerce platform for handling online orders; and
- Integrated online payment processing.
These tools will be integrated with GrubMarket’s current offerings, including WholesaleWare, its ERP software, and GrubAssist AI, its intelligent business assistant. This combined suite aims to streamline operations for food distributors, allowing them to focus on growth and customer service.
[RELATED: GrubMarket Acquires North Carolina-based Performance Produce]
Founded in 2020 by machine learning experts Winston Chi and Shangyan Li, 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.
“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 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.”
Mike Xu, CEO of GrubMarket, shared similar sentiments, “We are thrilled to welcome Butter and its formidable engineering team to the GrubMarket family. 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.”
After the acquisition, Butter will continue to be managed by Chi and Li, alongside its team of seasoned engineers with extensive experience in process-heavy products, ML applications and foodservice distribution.
