Summary List Placement Europe's tech investors are piling into dark store startups, hoping that superfast grocery delivery can disrupt retail in the way food delivery apps revolutionized takeaway. A dark store is essentially a grocery store without customers, dedicated to fulfilling online deliveries of groceries and other supplies. Buying your weekly food supply online is an established concept, but the new wave of dark store startups in Europe promise to cut urban delivery time from days or hours to as little as 10 minutes by using a network of small urban warehouses.