Insight
Domingues: Sustainability Goals Do Not Drive Grocery Executive or Consumer Decisions
“We don't talk about the food waste angle anymore because it's to the market that we're serving, both grocers, both consumers, like, it doesn't dictate purchasing power, and it, from consumers, it doesn't drive sales and purchases, and it doesn't, from all, a l…”
Opinion
Domingues says Canada is not big enough to build large businesses
“Canada is not big enough to build a big business in a lot of industries and sectors, in my opinion. Like, you need to go to America.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Domingues: Almost all grocery retailers donate food in massive quantities
“In the grocery space, every, almost every retailer donates food in massive quantities. In the restaurant space, same thing happens”
Insight
Domingues: Grocery stores must overstock fresh food due to consumer psychology
“If there's one watermelon on the shelf, as consumers, we assume it's the worst one, so they have to overstock the shelves so that we get selection. So like, kind of like, no matter how you paint it in a grocery store, you're always going to have surplus of fre…”
Insight
Domingues: Early-stage founders must actively try to disprove their startup ideas
“I think the important thing in a really early stage is you have to get to a no. You have to get to a reason why the idea that you have is not going to work because if you can't get to a no, then you should just keep going. And you have to be brutally honest wi…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Domingues: Early Flashfood pilots sold 70% of food and brought new shoppers
“So in this, like, in these pilots, we were selling about 70% of all the food we were driving in about 25 to 30% were net new shoppers to the store, and they were spending about two to three times more on full price food when they got to the store than what the…”
Insight
Domingues: Large Retailers Limit Themselves to One to Three Innovations Yearly
“And so what I've learned is for big companies, especially retailers, they only have so many, literally every year they do future planning where there's like, these are the five critical things we're working on. And maybe there's one or two innovations or three…”
Insight
Domingues: Corporate leaders advance by mitigating risk rather than making bold bets
“You think about the people in leadership positions within the company that you're in and how they got there. It was not by taking huge risks and being right. It was actually by like mitigating risk and staying in like the middle path and being respectful and b…”
Assertion Partly supported
Domingues: Flashfood scaled from 3 to 400 Loblaws stores in six weeks
“We got into Loblaws in the end of Q three, Q four of 20 18 in three of their stores in London. And by January in 2019, we went from like three stores to 400 over a span of six weeks.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Flashfood Signed a $5K/Month Lease With Only $50K to Recruit CTO
“We only have 50 K in the bank, and we saw, like, a small two-story loft space office in Liberty Village, and we rented it. I don't know why the landlord gave it to us. We signed a three-year lease, five grand a month, went on Kijiji, bought a whole bunch of us…”
Assertion Supported
Domingues: Global food waste is the third largest greenhouse gas emitter
“The statistic is if international food waste were a country, it'd be the third leading cause of greenhouse gas emission behind the U.S. And China”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Domingues: 40-Store Ontario Grocer Threw Out $150M in Food Annually
“One grocery store in Ontario at the time had roughly 40 locations. They had thrown out like a hundred and fifty million dollars worth of food the year before.”
Disclosure
Domingues: Flashfood founder had $40K personal debt before raising seed
“By the time we raised our seed round of three million, I had like 35 K of credit card line of credit debt, five grand of credit card debt, and like no money in my bank. Account.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Domingues sold $200 of expiring groceries in 20 minutes on the street
“We went to a store at Bay and Dundas in downtown Toronto, like the Times Square of Toronto, and there's a grocery store there, and I bought, like, 200 dollars worth of, like, food that had a day left of shelf life, and we set up a table at the corner of Bay an…”
Disclosure
Domingues: Farm Boy Dropped Flashfood After One-Year Pilot Due to Insufficient Scale
“Both Farm Boy and this other retailer at the time only had 30 locations. So we actually lost both of them, because after about a year of, like, these pilots, they're like, look, the ROI is just not that high for all of our stores to do this. Like, we only have…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Domingues: Flashfood returns $5M to $40M annually to established grocery partners
“Some of them, like, it's between, like, our established partners, it could be between, like, five and between five and forty million annualized that they're getting back from us.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Domingues: Flashfood sales plunged 90% in 48 hours at COVID onset
“We had a board meeting on the Friday when the NBA shut down and we were like, okay, let's model out if it gets cut in half the business. And then we were like, two days later we were selling like 10% of what we were like at the board meeting.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Domingues: Flashfood is not profitable and operates in under 2,500 stores
“Not profitable pushing towards it in just under 2500 stores.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Domingues: Flashfood has saved shoppers over $250M USD since launch
“Was that we've diverted, like, we've saved shoppers over two hundred and fifty million dollars U.S. On their groceries since we launched, so like, that's 50% off, so it's like, that would be the GMV number yeah.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Domingues: Flashfood generates tens of millions in annual revenue
“Yeah, we're at tens. We're in the tens of millions of revenue, and.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Domingues: Most surplus food on Flashfood is discounted at 50% off
“All the food's up to 50% off. Most of it's 50% off.”
Insight
Domingues: Professional Athletes Face Unique Early-Career and Cross-Border Tax Pressures
“Being an NHL hockey player or an athlete in general. It's really unique from a financial perspective because you make most of your money at a young age and there's a lot of cross border tax implications.”
Assertion Contradicted
Domingues: Bank of Scotland Cut 200 Advisors for Proprietary Robo-Advisor
“And then the Bank of Scotland fired like 200 of their financial advisors, and everybody who was a client with less than 200,000 got rolled into their proprietary robo-advisor”
Disclosure
Domingues: First version of Flashfood app cost $15K to build
“The app costs, like, the first version costs, like, 15 K by the time it was built”
