" After two years and two million deliveries (and $600,000 in parking tickets), FreshDirect has become the online grocery service that many New Yorkers have embraced, even while its ubiquitous trucks, piles of discarded boxes and high prices have irritated others. In 2004 FreshDirect had $100 million in sales, almost double the sales of the year before. Also last year, the number of New Yorkers who told the Zagat Survey that they had ordered groceries online rose to 52 percent from 16 percent.

FreshDirect (www.freshdirect.com) has survived where predecessors like Webvan and Urbanfetch failed, by aggressively catering to the kind of New Yorkers who would fill out a Zagat survey. Real estate brokers now routinely cite FreshDirect in their sales pitches in neighborhoods like Battery Park City, Harlem and Bayside, Queens, which are known to have poor access to fresh food. "