In November from his Southwest Roanoke home, Greg Land launched ShopFoodEx.com, a Web site through which people can create shopping lists and, for $14.95, have groceries delivered to their homes.

Land partners with Kroger, Wal-Mart, IGA and Tinnell's Finer Foods as outlets for purchasing the grocery items. Demand for home grocery delivery hasn't picked up at the speed Land expected, but other areas of the business have taken off, including mail order deliveries to soldiers based in Iraq.

Land discussed his thoughts with The Roanoke Times about his plans for the business.

Q. In what areas has ShopFoodEx.com seen the most success in its first year?

A. The mail order business. It really just took off. We didn't anticipate that. We set the Web site up, and within a couple of weeks we started getting a lot of out-of-town accounts. We had to scurry and set up the Web site for the mail order business. UPS comes by here every day. Also we're pretty well known at the post office. All of the military orders have to go through the post office. We send out military orders all over the world.

As soon as a new product hits the market, we essentially have got it on the Web site. So, we're doing really well with the new products and also doing well with hard-to-find products.

Wise Potato Chips, we're sending them out to Arizona, Hawaii. Grits, people can't find grits. There's just a lot of unique items that we have that are really hard to find.

It's just overwhelmingly across the country, they find our Web site through any search engine essentially. A good example is our best seller, Kraft Tangy Italian Spaghetti Dinner, in a green box. You and I have probably never had it. So, it's been around forever. It's had such a loyal following, but it's not available west of the Rockies. So, we're shipping out hundreds of boxes of that stuff.

Q. Which areas of the business have not been successful?

A. Home delivery. We've been a little disappointed in that. I think we need to attribute that to just lack of advertising.

There have been a couple of other very small companies that have come and started something similar but nowhere near the scope. They would be here a week and see that it wasn't as easy as they thought it would be. We picked up quite a few of those customers who were very disappointed. They said, "We don't know what happened to them. They delivered our groceries last week, and they're gone this week." The reason why it [home delivery] hasn't taken off like we had thought it would is because we've had no marketing budget. So word of mouth has helped us out a whole lot.

Our customers that we do have for home delivery, they're fanatical. We have really good home delivery customers but not enough of them.

We just got back a proposal from a local ad agency. We are looking over the proposal and deciding which route to take with that. We've been very lucky to be where we're at with really doing no advertising.

I think what it is in Roanoke, people want to know that you're going to be here. Roanoke tends to have almost a ... negative connotation with really new businesses. People are very wary of those. We're committing to being here. This will work.

Q. Which kinds of people are most using home grocery delivery?

A. One of the customer segments I envisioned was having retired people who live here who were not Internet savvy, but their sons and daughters, who lived out of state, could order their groceries. That has come to fruition.

Our core customers tend to be younger, 25 to 50, and ... mostly very busy families with children.

Also, we do a lot of the handicapped, which, of course, makes sense. That's their window out. I've heard a lot of encouraging, heartening stories from handicapped people. They tug at you. We have one customer who said this is like a miracle that you guys are here.

Q. What changes are you making in the business?

A. We have an enhancement coming within the next week or two weeks that will make an already fast shopping experience probably two or three times faster, where you can add multiple items to the cart at one time.

Adding multiple items to the shopping cart at one time is a key enhancement that will really makethings very lightning fast.

Now, it adds it [grocery items] to the cart and refreshes that page again and again. With the enhancement in ... you can put it all in the cart at one time.

Q. When do you expect to turn a profit?

A. We'll break even the first year, which we all agree that's fantastic, considering no advertising. We've kept our overhead tremendously low, way below our initial budget.

We've been fortunate. It usually takes about three years to break even.

But I think it's so important that customers know that we're going to be here.