Hy-Vee cut its fulfillment promise to 30 minutes in July. Now its CEO is going after the 40 minutes customers spend before the order is even placed.
At Groceryshop in Las Vegas, CEO Jeremy Gosch said Hy-Vee aims to let shoppers complete an online order in five minutes or less, down from roughly 40 minutes on average today, according to Grocery Dive's report on the keynote Grocery Dive. The company is relying on AI to preload carts with repeat purchases and to recognize when customer preferences shift, and it is "doing a full rewrite" of all its digital properties with beta testing to start within the next month.
The mechanism matters more than the number. Five-minute ordering is not a logistics problem — Hy-Vee already offers delivery and pickup in as fast as 30 minutes — it is a basket-building problem. The clock that runs long is the one where a customer scrolls an online catalog, searches for items they bought last month, and rebuilds a list from scratch. Gosch framed the target as speed without sterility: the system has to keep repeat purchases one tap away while still surfacing seasonal goods, because in a market with four distinct seasons, "that changes the basket pretty significantly," he said Grocery Dive.
Hy-Vee's existing e-commerce investment gives the new target its starting line. In July, the employee-owned grocer rolled out online orders fulfilled in as fast as 30 minutes chainwide, with pickup free for PERKS Plus members and delivery at $4.95, selectable at checkout through a "Get it faster" option Hy-Vee. That release promised time savings on the fulfillment side; the five-minute project is aimed squarely at the shopping side.
The strategic context is that online grocery's remaining friction is no longer speed of delivery, which several competitors have commoditized, but the effort of assembling a basket. A customer who can reorder in five minutes buys more often and abandons fewer carts, and that behavior is worth more to a regional grocer than winning a delivery race it has already run. It also raises the competitive bar for chains whose digital experience still assumes customers will browse.
The execution risk is in the personalization. Gosch said Hy-Vee uses both its own internal teams and third-party partners for its digital buildout Grocery Dive, and a system that preloads carts is only as good as its read on what a household actually wants next — a theme he carried into a post-keynote interview at Groceryshop, where the conversation turned on where the grocery business goes from here Omni Talk. Get it wrong and the retailer converts a browsing problem into a trust problem, with unwanted items filling the cart at checkout.
If the beta lands, watch for the number to migrate from keynote stage to industry benchmark. Five minutes is aggressive — it would compress a task most chains have not tried to time at all — but it reframes what grocers are actually competing on: not who delivers fastest, but who makes ordering take least thought.