Erewhon's Chief Growth Officer reveals membership drives over half of revenue and tech stack is fully in-house with 10 engineers

Erewhon: membership machine, commissary model, 10-person tech team

Kabir Jain has been Erewhon's Chief Growth Officer for eight years, joining when the chain had four stores and no corporate office. It now runs 14 locations across Los Angeles, with three more opening next year — the Palisades reopening, Downtown LA, and Newport Beach.

Why LA-only is a feature, not a constraint

Erewhon's expansion logic runs through its commissary kitchen in Downtown LA, which supplies prepared foods to every store. Without a central kitchen, the prepared-foods model doesn't work — and Jain is clear that the prepared foods are what differentiate Erewhon from a standard grocery chain. New markets like the Bay Area or New York are in scope, but only once the supply chain can support them. The brand risk of a stumble weighs heavier than the opportunity cost of waiting. Tony and Justine, the owners, bought the original Grove location in 2011 and waited three years before opening a second store. The pace has since accelerated to three openings a year, which Jain describes as fast by Erewhon's standards.

“Sales from members are well over half of our business... We run a separate DTC Shopify site standalone that we're merging in now. We have an applied AI engineer who's building internal tools using AI... We've got 14 stores across the Los Angeles market today.”

Membership drives more than half of revenue

Sales from members account for well over half of Erewhon's total revenue. Jain compares the long-run ambition to Costco's model, where membership becomes close to the entirety of the business. The customer journey is deliberately slow: someone comes in with a friend, tries a breakfast burrito, returns for a smoothie, visits a few more times solo, and by the third or fourth visit buys the membership. Once in, churn is minimal unless the customer leaves LA. Erewhon recently launched a tiered membership program to deepen engagement further.

Third-party delivery as a customer acquisition channel

Erewhon runs both first-party and third-party delivery. Uber Eats and Postmates handle third-party, and Jain treats that channel as a marketing machine rather than a margin driver — pricing is marked up to offset fees, keeping it margin neutral. The first-party app is where loyalty economics live: members earn points only on the Erewhon app, not on third-party platforms. The explicit strategy is to use Uber Eats for top-of-funnel acquisition and then migrate customers to the owned channel. Almost all delivery orders, across both channels, are prepared foods rather than full grocery shops.

10 engineers, all in-house

The entire technology stack — app, website, data warehouse — is built and maintained by a team of 10 people, including developers, data engineers, and a recently hired data scientist. Erewhon previously used a third-party app that Jain describes as genuinely bad. The decision to rebuild from scratch was a deliberate brand call: the app needed to reflect the in-store experience. The team is also integrating an applied AI engineer focused on internal tooling. A standalone Shopify DTC site is currently being merged into the main app.

CPG brand platform

Erewhon positions itself as the top-of-funnel for CPG launches. Where Whole Foods runs six-month category reviews, Erewhon reviews products every Thursday and can get a new brand on shelf in as little as two weeks. Jain is candid that getting in is the easy part — selling once on the shelf is what determines whether a brand survives. He also warns would-be CPG founders that the category is brutally competitive. The Hailey Bieber smoothie collaboration is offered as an anomaly, not a template — it broke the internet, but the standard celebrity collab is a 30-day top-of-funnel exercise that reaches audiences Erewhon doesn't already own. The economics of those collabs are not material to the P&L.

Zero paid advertising, for now

Erewhon spends nothing on traditional advertising. Jain acknowledges that will change when the brand enters a second major market, where organic awareness won't carry the same weight it does in LA.