Thrive Market CEO donates salary to Covid-19 relief fund

Nick Green, Thrive Market co-founder and CEO, joined Yahoo Finance to talk about what he's doing to help during the coronavirus pandemic.

Video Transcript

JEN ROGERS: In today's road to recovery, we are talking about Thrive Market. It is a membership-based market online. And right now, joining us, is Nick Green. He is Thrive Market's co-founder and CEO. So Nick, first of all, before we get into what you are doing in the recovery and getting back, for people who aren't familiar with Thrive Market, what is it, exactly?

NICK GREEN: Yeah, so as you said, we're a membership club for healthy and organic products. So our mission is to make healthy living easy and accessible for anybody. And basically, what we do is, we ship the best healthy and organic products that you'd find in a health food retailer-- a place like Whole Foods. But we do it at wholesale prices, ship from zero waste warehouses through carbon neutral shipping anywhere in the country. So a lot of it's food. But it's not just food. We've got pantry staples, bath and body, home supplements, pet.

About half what you buy in a grocery store, anything non-perishable, we ship it at wholesale prices. And you pay $60 a year as a member. And then we fund with every paid membership, a free membership for a low income family

JEN ROGERS: So we all know what shopping has been like during this pandemic. There have been empty shelves places. There have been lines. We've seen an online spike. What has your business been like?

NICK GREEN: I mean, we're seeing the same thing. And I'd say broadly, there's been two major ways of demand. The first was pre-shelter in place or pre-stay at home, when people were stocking up. And I think that wave hit us as an online retailer, and also was probably getting brick and mortar retailers just as hard. The second wave has been during stay at home. And I think that's where things have really shifted online. The stat that I read recently was that you had 5% of households buying online in February. 30% bought some groceries online during the month of Marsh. And I'm sure that number went up in April.

So it's been a massive shift online. Obviously, huge challenges for us to keep our inventory levels high, to get scale of fulfillment so we can serve all the demand. And really for us, just a moment for our mission, right? Before the crisis, access to healthy food was something a lot of people were thinking about. During this crisis, everybody's thinking about how to play healthy meals on the table for their family.

RICK NEWMAN: Hey, Nick. Rick Newman here. Are your customers hoarding? And what kind of supply chain disruptions are you dealing with?

NICK GREEN: Yeah, so I go back to the two waves I described before. Early on, yes. There was some of that stocking up behavior, the quote unquote bunker building. We saw some orders as there were $5,000. We had a few orders that were up $10,000. You know, that those are people that are not planning on consuming that product anytime soon.

And during that period, we also saw the kinds of things people were buying were those stock products, right-- The canned beans, the things that they were going to be planning on saving for months.

What we've seen in the second wave has really been people just trying to replicate what they would normally buy in a physical grocery store, but buy online. So you know, we've seen our 800,000 members shifting share of wallet towards Thrive Market. Maybe before, they were buying some of their stuff on Thrive, but also shopping at Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. Now, they're shopping, instead of every month on Thrive, every week on Thrive, and buying everything with us.

So I think that has been much more broad based. Early on we saw 80x spike in hand sanitizer purchases. Now what we're seeing is a more moderate spike. But it's across the entire catalog, as people really shift online.

JEN ROGERS: So tell us what you're doing yourself. You are donating your salary? Is that right?

NICK GREEN: Yeah, well let me first tell you what our members are doing, which is, they've donated over $350,000 with donated checkout, to a relief fund that we set up, the Thrive Market COVID-19 relief fund. So we put that in place about a week into the crisis, and basically shifted our donated checkout tool, which is raised over $2 million for its food access causes in the last three years, entirely towards relief for families directly affected by the crisis. So it's basically providing grocery stipends to families and to health care workers.

So our members have been donating at nine times their typical donated checkout rate. And seeing that over the course of a month just really inspired me. And the only thing that was outstripping the donations was their need from people applying for these grants. So as I saw that number going up, I had a conversation with my wife and decided the right thing to do is to join with our members. And I decided to donate my salary for the remainder of 2020.

JEN ROGERS: Nick Green, nice work with that. I would like to talk to you, hopefully, maybe when you're out of this pandemic, and see how it's all going. Do you have hand sanitizer in stock, by the way?

NICK GREEN: We have a hand sanitizer in stock. We have direct relationships with all of our vendors. And we're very curated. So more than most, we've been able to actually stay in stock.

JEN ROGERS: All right, Nick Green. Thank you so much, from Thrive Market. Great to get a chance to talk.