Winnetka Brothers Who Founded PeaPod Launch New Grocery Start-Up

WINNETKA, IL — By the time they sold their last start-up, entrepreneurs Andrew and Thomas Parkinson already had a plan for another one.

The brothers, co-founders of online grocery delivery service PeaPod, spun off a product data management firm called ItemMaster from Peapod and sold it to a company now known as Syndigo in January 2019.

That sale followed their departure a few years earlier from their longtime roles as executives at Peapod, which they founded in Evanston in 1989. It was later headquartered in Skokie before moving to Chicago in 2018.

In 2000, Dutch grocer Royal Ahold purchased a majority share of Peapod in exchange for $73 million that helped save it from bankruptcy, taking over the rest of the then-publicly traded company the following year for about $35 million.

Thomas Parkinson said Ahold allowed the brothers to continue running the business as their own for more than a dozen years, but things changed when the Ahold merged with the Belgian company Delhaize Group. The merger was announced in 2015, the same year his brother departed.

"When that merger happened, management changed, and we didn't even know a lot of the people, and so then, all those relationships we build kind of just vanished, because a lot of the Ahold people left," he told Patch. "It was no longer us running our business, and I was just an employee at that point. It wasn't a whole lot of fun for me."

In February 2020, just as COVID-19 began to be detected in Illinois, Peapod parent Ahold Delhaize USA announced it was cutting service in Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana and eliminating 500 jobs.

"They've actually killed the brand here in Chicago because their whole supermarket business is out on the East Coast, so they just decided, 'This is not worth it for us to be defocused,'" Thomas Parkinson said. "They closed it two months before COVID hit. The business would have just taken off."

The brothers' new grocery technology venture, Sifter, relies on retailers to provide streams of inventory and nutrition data to allow shoppers to filter foods to match their individual dietary needs. It does not deliver products to consumers.

"I did 30 years of that, I never want to move another physical good," Thomas Parkinson said. "I just want to connect buyers with sellers."

"Well, really, our passion is, at this point in our life, to help people with their health by finding products that actually help them," Andrew Parkinson said. "We're just kind of fortunate to have that background on just the data side and the online grocery side, but it's not so much to provide delivery as to provide product discovery and to help you get those products for your diet."

The software allows users to customize and save their profiles based on whatever their particular dietary needs may be, making it easier to shop for — or to advertise to — someone who is allergic to certain items, a vegan, or both.

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"We're kind of like a shopping portal, in the sense that, because we have great data, we tag all the products. You discover all the products on Sifter and then just drop them into, or go to, whichever retailer you want that carries that product," Andrew Parkinson said.

"I think the real benefit is the customer doesn't have to read thousands of labels to determine whether a product meets your diet or not."

Free to customers, Sifter generates revenue through affiliate fees with retailers and hopes to make money from retailers and marketers.

Sifter currently includes product data representing about 70 percent of the all-commodity volume of grocery stores, Andrew Parkinson said. The company currently now has 11 employees and 25 contractors, and a mobile app that would allow users to scan products in the grocery store is in the works.