3. What elements would you expect to be in each quadrant of Peapod’s balanced scorecard? The grocery industry is a like a food fi ght without the mess. It is so competitive that only the strongest survive. Now imagine trying to survive in the online grocery industry, where customers can’t see, smell, or touch the goods, and they expect their orders to be accurate and arrive on time. Finally, picture being one of the few companies to ride out the original dot-com storm. Those are daunting challenges for any fi rm. But Peapod, the online grocery service founded in 1989 by brothers Andrew and Thomas Parkinson, is succeeding on all three fronts.

Peapod introduced a new concept 15 years ago: the convenience of shopping for groceries online.

Plenty of skeptics said the idea wouldn’t fl y, but some consumers and businesses were intrigued and began to order their groceries online. When many dot-coms of the era began to fail, Peapod hung on. Step into the management workplace at Peapod to see how the company maintained control during such challenging and turbulent times.