I never thought of it solving those types of problems but you are absolutely right. I believe targeting and marketing to these niche markets are the key to success for businesses like this. They stated in the article that they expected the core demographic to be guys who want protein shakes but it ended up being busy mothers. That shows how far off your initial impressions of the market may be.

The fundamental problem I see with this app is that it is mobile only. It seems like they are cutting out a huge portion of people who prefer to make purchases (especially large ones) via computer. Chances are, you are going to want a single company account to make purchases like these for restaurants, etc. That way you can have the restaurant manager, owner, or new employee make the purchases from the back room.

When I worked children's birthdays, the distributor we used for paper plates, cups, paper towels, etc was only contacted via phone. Anyone could call (including me at 16) and place an order for 2 boxes of plates or whatever. They would then send our order to our location and invoice over to the head office. I wasn't trusted with the credit card information but it was my job to make sure we never ran out of plates. The system currently in place with this app would have never worked for us, although having a reminder that we might be low on plates would have been helpful on numerous occasions.