Hy-Vee Aims to Cut Online Order Time to Five Minutes

Hy-Vee wants shoppers to place an online grocery order in five minutes or less. CEO Jeremy Gosch said the regional grocer is looking to cut the time it takes for shoppers to place an order on its website to no more than five minutes.

The five-minute target signals where Hy-Vee sees the next battleground in grocery e-commerce: speed at the point of ordering, not just speed of delivery. For regional grocers competing against national players with larger technology budgets, a friction-free ordering flow can be the difference between a completed basket and an abandoned cart.

Gosch's goal applies to the order-placement experience on the company's website. That covers the full path from landing on the site through search, item selection and checkout. Compressing that journey to five minutes would put Hy-Vee's digital experience closer to the convenience of walking a familiar store aisle with a short list.

The move comes as online grocery continues to account for a growing share of supermarket sales, and as retailers race to remove every point of friction from digital shopping. Grocers that streamline ordering stand to raise order frequency, basket size and customer retention among time-pressed shoppers.

For Hy-Vee, the initiative fits its broader digital push, which includes e-commerce fulfillment and delivery operations built to serve shoppers across its Midwest footprint. Faster ordering compounds the value of that infrastructure: the easier it is to build a cart, the more often customers will use the channel.

Gosch did not lay out a specific timeline for hitting the five-minute benchmark. But the target itself gives the retailer a clear, measurable standard for its digital experience — one that ties website performance directly to the CEO's agenda.