My insight into Sprig's business was limited, but my impression from being in the industry at the time and knowing several of their vendors and folks working fo

My insight into Sprig's business was limited, but my impression from being in the industry at the time and knowing several of their vendors and folks working for them in operations was that they were a typical Bay Area startup operating in an industry they understood poorly, without much interest in learning it from people who had made it their lifeblood for generations. You won't get far in the food industry if you don't appreciate that relationships are everything -- you can't treat vendors like APIs that hand you some resource, while building a reputation for low pay among the people making and delivering your food. Good relationships with your vendors are how you earn pricing to support good margins even at "low" scale (compared to say Kroger) and unlock doors that will take you to 10x and higher. Good relationships with your employees is how you make people in the industry want to see you succeed -- no one wants to see yet another player show up in their industry driving down wages (allegedly in the name of efficiency while wasting orders of magnitude more food than your typical corner market with approximately the same revenue). And while none of this will get you all the way there when it comes to city government, it certainly doesn't hurt.