For Natalie Andersen and Erik O’Donnell, grocery shopping is more of a hobby than an errand.

On weekends, the couple venture across Los Angeles – including the Armenian grocer Super King and India Sweets and Spices – in search of pantry items and produce that rarely show up at the big-box supermarkets. Living near Seafood City’s Eagle Rock location, they treat the Filipino grocery chain as both a destination and a discovery engine for new spices, hot sauces, ice cream flavors and an array of bananas – including saba bananas, apple bananas, Thai bananas, banana blossoms and banana leaves.

“It’s a great store to wander around,” Andersen says. “I don’t know what things are in there.”

Shoppers like Andersen and O’Donnell are a happy surprise for international grocers like Seafood City, which first opened in 1989 catering to Filipino families and now has a more diverse customer base in the San Fernando Valley. As customers’ tastes have broadened, so have expectations around convenience. That has left international grocers scrambling to meet where shoppers are – and that’s online.

Roughly 25% of Gen Z shoppers start their grocery buying journey online, based on 2025 report from the Food Industry Association and NielsenIQ. The growing demand has been driven by consumers’ adoption of platforms like Instacart, DoorDash, Walmart and Amazon.com. For independent and family-owned grocers – many of which still operate on legacy point-of-sale systems – meeting customers where they increasingly shop has proven difficult.

That wide gap is where Glendale-based LocalExpress has found its footing.

“Amazon was getting their momentum because they had their own technology, Walmart was investing a lot,” says Bagrat Safarian, co-founder and chief executive of grocery tech platform. “All of the independents were kind of being cut away from access to technology.”

Founded nearly a decade ago by Bagrat Safarian, Armen Danelian and Tigran Zograbyan, LocalExpress was born out of a failed attempt to bring a small Armenian market online using a general-purpose e-commerce platform. Today, the platform has accumulated more than 1,000 retail customers, including DoorDash, across the U.S., Canada and Latin America. And LocalExpress is on a growth path. The startup nabbed $6.2 million in venture funding in September to power its artificial intelligence capabilities.

“We didn’t see in the market any solution that can help specifically independents to the modern e-commerce,” Safarian said.

Expanding American palates

Culturally-specific grocery chains – such as Seafood City, Patel Brothers, H Mart and 99 Ranch Market – got their start in the 1970s and 1980s. They were one-stop, mom-and-pop businesses that imported familiar goods for growing immigrant enclaves.

Each chain has since expanded their footprint alongside the growing American palate, taking up more space in consumers’ grocery budgets and store aisles. 

“As we expanded and grew the business, we really saw more and more non-Filipinos shop at the store,” says Patricia Francisco, the director of digital marketing and events at Pomona-based Seafood City.

The family-owned chain has more than 38 locations in the U.S. and Canada. 

 “It was also our way to be able to introduce, whether it’s dishes or grocery items, ingredients that typically would not be part of what they would normally purchase,” Francisco said

According to location intelligence platform Placer.ai, visits to Asian grocers outpaced the overall grocery segment in the first half of 2025.

Big-box retailers have taken note. In 2023, the Kroger Co. introduced a Latino-inspired private label grocery line called Mercado.

‘Creating the same experience’

As that space has become increasingly competitive, LocalExpress saw an opportunity to bring the international grocery chains into the modern age.

“All these regionals and independents, they’re operators,” says Safarian. “They don’t have time to set up this complicated technology. They want something to navigate and help them run their business.”

LocalExpress built a platform designed specifically for grocery retailers, allowing chains like Seafood City to create an online shopping application for its customers and manage inventory for all their goods. The company’s platform connects directly to a store’s point-of-sale system to pull the existing catalogue, and it then uses AI to clean the data into a more uniform inventory with a series of photos and attributes – like the product’s description, title, manufacturer, size and allergens. This allows independent grocers to operate on DoorDash.

“We’re trying to bring them the same experience that Walmart is getting with ChatGPT, or Aldi, or other big box names,” Safarian says. “We’re creating the same experiences for them so they can offer (these services) to the end users.”

There are several reasons behind why smaller grocery stores have difficulty competing with big-box stores when it comes to online shopping and delivery. While companies with more runways can develop their own e-commerce systems, most widely available platforms like Shopify don’t translate well to grocery retail.

Grocery stores often have anywhere from 25,000 to 50,000 unique pieces of inventory that move from the warehouse to the shelf to the customer’s cart, according to LocalExpress.

Sales, bulk buying and two-for-one coupons are often hard to track on generalist e-commerce platforms as well, requiring mom-and-pop stores – already juggling supply chain changes, logistical issues, and razor-thin margins – to manage yet another platform.

Grocery retailers also operate anywhere from 70 to 100 unique technology systems between their point-of-sale systems, logistics and marketing, says Maria Gallegos, chief marketing officer at LocalExpress. These highly disparate stacks require any new entrants, like LocalExpress, to work with the systems already in place to be an enticing option for grocers.

There is also the issue of adoption fatigue. Gallegos says grocers are drowning in various technology stacks that promise to drive up margins and temper chaos, but it comes at the cost of gambling on these investments.

“That becomes another question of, do I move now?” says Gallegos. “Do I wait and see if something better comes?”

Then, there are the requirements around delivery and pickup of goods. Companies like DoorDash ask grocery stores to upload their massive inventory of baked goods, produce and other pantry items online. Each item must be tagged with 50 attributes to be made available to online shoppers.

This process becomes even more difficult for niche grocers that import goods from other countries. The unfamiliar packaging and contents can be unrecognizable to automated systems – which are fed through images and descriptions of more popular grocery items – without proper oversight to catch the correct attributes.

The ability to use AI to better make the onboarding process more streamlined, Safarian says, is part of the company’s competitive advantage.

“It is the ability to actually bring the catalog online, because the products are so unique,” he says.

Swift adoption

In the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic, as businesses shuttered and customers adopted grocery delivery and grab-and-go options, independent and smaller grocery stores were forced to quickly adopt new technology.

Seafood City, among other small and mid-sized grocers, partnered with LocalExpress in 2020 to enable online shopping and curbside pickup, and to collect valuable data on the customer experience to inform the company’s growth strategy.

“Being a very family-owned business, there are a lot of intricacies with our own internal systems,” Francisco says. “We needed to find a partner who would be able to work with what we had, because we weren’t using the types of systems that major chains have.”

That’s a far cry from when LocalExpress onboarded its first grocery.Old Fashion Deli and Market, an Armenian market located in Glendale that sold prepared foods and pantry staples, didn’t even have a website when it joined the LocalExpress platform in 2017.

When Safarian visited the store, customers browsed the aisles, clutching printed screenshots of the goods available on LocalExpress.

Andersen and O’Donnell will often thumb through Seafood City’s online catalogue in their free time, looking for something to pique their interest, which may one day be added to their well-traveled pantry.

“That,” O’Donnell says, “is the benefit of living in Los Angeles.”