Chitamart connects neighborhood mini-marts, personal shoppers, drivers, and customers in one network.
Stores keep their own pricing and inventory. Customers shop a virtual mini-mart or send a list. Shoppers and drivers get paid work tied to real orders — not a feed that treats them as interchangeable.
Virtual mini-marts, personal shopping, and courier runs use the same system, so the store, the worker, and the customer stay on the same order.
In 2018 the founder lived in La Conchita, a beach community in Ventura County, California, with no grocery store in the neighborhood. The nearest market was twenty minutes each way. The name Chitamart comes from La Conchita — “little shell” — a small store that belongs to the place it serves.
He built a simple website, put up flyers, and delivered snacks on a scooter. La Conchita has one road in and one road out. That isolation is still the company’s backbone: people taking care of themselves instead of waiting for a chain.
The first version worked until he moved to Isla Vista to study physics at UC Santa Barbara. He retired Chitamart during college.
Then COVID hit. After a year of lockdowns, UC President Michael V. Drake forced mRNA vaccine mandates. The founder was kicked out of the physics program for refusing the shot. The career he had spent his savings on was over.
He left California for Texas — for liberty, not permission — and rebuilt Chitamart as an enterprise platform. Same problem in a different landscape: too much time and gas burned getting to a store. The point of the platform is to let other people earn, keep control of their stores and their labor, and cut that trip down.