Food
A Blinq concierge desk at the Montgomery BART station in downtown San Francisco, Calif., is prepared Thursday afternoon, Nov. 5, 2015 for opening later this week. The company will be offering dry cleaning, groceries and “new products and cultural finds.”
Friday heralds the appearance of a kinder, hipper outpost of commerce in BART’s fusty, decades-old stations as the transit agency welcomes kiosks purveying groceries, dry cleaning and a changeable array of offbeat, with-it products.
Blinq, billing itself as an online-to-offline retail organizer, is opening the doors of what it calls “pods” in the concourses of the Embarcadero and Montgomery stations to entice BART’s thousands of daily commuters with “new products and cultural finds.”
“For instance,” Blinq marketing chief Saf Elmansour said, the company “will provide farm-to-table food 20 to 50 percent cheaper than Whole Foods. We’ll bring the actual farmers in.” That would be Grubmarket, an online purveyor of locally sourced fresh foods and other products delivered to customers’ doors and now to BART stations.
Saf Elmansour prepares a Blinq pop-up retail space in the Montgomery BART station in downtown San Francisco, Calif.,Thursday afternoon, Nov. 5, 2015. The shop, as well as one at the Embarcadero station, open later this week. The company will offer dry cleaning, sell groceries and “new products and cultural finds.”
Also selling in the pods will be EO, a Marin County-based manufacturer of organic and natural personal care shampoos and soaps; Sol Republic, a maker of headphones and speakers; and Greener Cleaners, an eco-friendly dry cleaner.
Blinq plans to feature other products in pop-up spaces for a few months each.
Next in line for the pods and pop-ups are the Civic Center station in San Francisco, the 12th and 19th Street stations in Oakland, and downtown Berkeley. All are to open by the end of the year, he said.
The new kiosks may offer delectable edibles, but BART’s policy of no food or drink on trains has not changed.
Blinq will staff concierge services such as dry cleaning, grocery delivery and pickup in one part of the pod. On the other side will be the pop-up brands that Blinq and its leasing agent, SRS Real Estate Partners, will seek out and change out with three- to nine-month leases.
“We want to change the experience,” Elmansour said.
Another experience, he said, will be products and services matched to the neighborhoods and cultures around the stations. For example, Blinq’s Mission Street station pod will be different from Walnut Creek’s, he said. The pods also will feature video screens with BART train times, and a mobile app will note events in station neighborhoods.
“People will be able to use Blinq to take care of errands, access exclusive deals and giveaways, and discover great brands and local community events,” according to a news release.
Blinq CEO Alexis Wong is said to have sought to recreate the experience of urban transit in Hong Kong, where she grew up. Stations there were also hubs of local goods and services.
“We think this combination of experiences, shopping and community is the future of the metro hub,” she said.
