After EDS, GroceryWorks gives Fernandes food for thought

Fernandes

If variety is the spice of life, then alumnus Gary Fernandes is a taco piled high with picante.

Which, with an order of $60 or more, he’d be glad to have delivered to your home at no extra charge.

Gary’s day job since January last year has been serving as chair and CEO of GroceryWorks.com, an internet business that delivers everything from frozen ice cream to entire meals to homes in several Texas cities. Which alone is saying a mouthful, but he’s got even more iron skillets over the cook fire: He’s on several boards of directors, he runs a farm north of Commerce that’s stocked with Arabian horses and black Angus cattle and he partners a chain of travel stores with his son.

If cruising the internet isn’t how you get your Crest and therefore GroceryWorks doesn’t ring a bell, you may nevertheless recognize those adorable produce mascots to the GroceryWorks logo. There’s the head of cabbage that with a few deft twists and tucks becomes a pig so fetching he’d give Babe and Wilbur a run for their money, the enigmatic banana octopus and the friendly father-son (a guess; the press release didn’t specify gender) tomato duo. The GroceryWorks produce art is so popular, its creators have made them into children’s books.

It's the cabbage pig that Gary digs

And the answer to the question you’re all asking is: the pig. Yes, it’s the cabbage pig that’s Gary’s personal favorite. (And if that didn’t happen to be the question you were asking, the other answer is yes, GroceryWorks does accept manufacturers’ coupons.)

Gary has a humongous canvas rendition of the cabbage pig hanging in his office. Why’s it his favorite? All he says is: “The pig’s kinda me.”

Now don’t go getting any ideas. Gary’s waistline is just fine. But the produce pig does wear a rather intent expression, and for that matter, so does Gary.

Perhaps intensity is one reason he was so successful at EDS, for whom he traveled the globe before retiring after 30 years. And maybe it’s one reason he’s not too afraid to tackle that sometimes scary e-commerce stuff.

Who shops GroceryWorks and why

Despite the internet angle, GroceryWorks customers are much like those at any other food store, according to Gary. GroceryWorks has 85,000 customers in Austin, Houston and Dallas/Fort Worth, and mostly they buy milk, eggs, and bread—though they tend to buy them in larger quantities, he says, like 50 pounds of dog food at a time.

Seventy-eight percent of his customers are moms, divided about evenly between those working and those staying at home. But all, Gary says, are pressed for time and have internet access. And almost all of them hate to grocery shop. For many of his customers, a GroceryWorks purchase is the first thing they’ve ever bought online.

He’d like to see GroceryWorks go national, into the top 12 metro markets, since GroceryWorks does best in an urban setting. The expansion would probably emphasize western locations, but before they take the business elsewhere, says Gary, “First, we’ve gotta get it right here.”

In north Texas, “here” is at the top of an imposing gray building on Dallas North Tollway. Headquarters starts behind a set of double glass doors where there’s a waiting area filled with modern furniture and tabletops littered with copies of “Industry Standard: the magazine of the internet industry.” It’s all literally topped by giant cut-outs of the veggie critters. Size aside, a quartet of grinning green onions has nothing on the even more chipper GroceryWorks receptionist.

In this business, 36 years is a long time

Being vice president of venerable EDS for 30 years isn’t much of a stretch to being at the helm of an all-but upstart internet business, Gary claims, pointing out that EDS once was an upstart itself.

But there are a couple differences.

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