“If another business asks why we chose Metrobi, I’d say it’s because of the seamless onboarding and outstanding customer support, the effortless Shopify integration that minimizes manual backend work, and the professional drivers with clean, well-maintained vehicles who provide a premium delivery experience and represent our brand exceptionally well.”
Introducing Oishii !
The business
Who is Oishii, and how did the business grow?
Oishii is a vertical farming company — or as some call it, an agricultural technology company — growing strawberries indoors using Japanese seeds and robotics. Robots select, cut, and quality-check each strawberry; a separate machine measures sweetness (brix level) before the fruit is graded. Anything above 13 is considered good; a reading of 16-17 sends the whole office fighting over who gets to try it.
Oishii operates two facilities: a smaller original site Nick calls the “HQ,” running four to five indoor farms, and a mega-facility in South Jersey with 10 to 15 farms supplying major retailers like Whole Foods and Stop & Shop. The company sells four grades of strawberries — Koyo, Nyoho, Omakase, and its newest and most exclusive, Condor grade — the latter reserved for strawberries left on the stem longer to maximize sweetness and juiciness. For its highest-end clients, Oishii will even fly strawberries out directly.
📍101 Linden Ave E, Jersey City, NJ
Challenge
Oishii needed a delivery partner who could be trusted with an unusually delicate, high-value product as the company scaled past what its own trucks and drivers could reasonably cover — especially for last-minute detours and time-sensitive customer windows.
Solution
With Metrobi, Oishii built a Shopify-to-Zapier-to-Metrobi integration that automatically books a driver the moment a customer places an order, paired with a small, preferred pool of drivers trained to handle delicate fruit with care.
Result
Oishii relaunched its Condor grade strawberries for direct-to-consumer sale with Metrobi handling delivery from day one, while gaining the reliability to expand from wholesale and press/PR deliveries into a full D2C offering.
The Challenge
Why did Oishii need a new delivery solution?
As Oishii grew, its own delivery trucks — originally built around wholesale routes — became harder to stretch. Adding an extra stop meant either delaying other deliveries or arriving at odd hours; asking a driver already headed to Connecticut to detour through New York often meant a customer receiving strawberries at 6 a.m., which wasn’t workable.
Before trusting Metrobi with its own product, Oishii tested the platform by placing orders from another Metrobi-using merchant, a Brooklyn cake shop, and shipping them to four locations around New York City — evaluating how carefully drivers handled the product in transit and whether they followed merchant instructions on drop-off.
The solution
How does Oishii book deliveries with Metrobi?
Oishii’s Shopify store is connected to Metrobi through Zapier: once a customer selects a delivery date and time, the order automatically creates a delivery in Metrobi.
Canceling an order in Shopify automatically cancels the driver — no manual cleanup needed.
Order placed
Customer selects delivery date and time on Oishii's Shopify site.
Auto-booked
Zapier sends the confirmed order directly into the Metrobi platform, requesting a driver.
Approve & adjust
Oishii works primarily with a small pool of trusted drivers who understand how to handle delicate fruit — with a backup driver in place if the primary is unavailable.
The results
What changed for Oishii after switching to Metrobi?
Oishii officially relaunched its Condor grade strawberries for direct-to-consumer delivery, taking its first order on day one — with more expected as press, PR, and celebrity-client deliveries grow into a wider D2C program.
The company is running the offering as an eight-week pilot, with expansion depending on both delivery performance and how much of the delicate, longer-to-ripen Condor grade the farms can produce.
Oishii identified one driver in particular, Jonathan, as a standout after he completed a two-and-a-half-hour delivery to the Hamptons — leading Oishii to request him as a preferred driver going forward, with a second driver, Marlon, as backup.
In their words
Nick Daley is Senior Operations Manager at Oishii, overseeing the company’s direct-to-consumer and wholesale channels outside of core strawberry production.
