![]() With those deliveries, he says, “speed isn’t everything” - people are unlikely to need (or expect) their weekly supermarket shop delivered within half an hour. With other partners, like supermarkets, Wolt picks up more complicated, larger orders worth hundreds of euros. (These deliveries are generally easier and quicker to carry out than restaurant food deliveries, says Kuusi, because there’s no need to factor in the time it takes for food to be cooked, and it’s easier to stack and pack tins than burger boxes.) With some of these partners, Wolt picks up small deliveries which need to be fulfilled quickly. “Partners can provide as good an experience and efficiency as dark stores.” Wolt now has 1,500 retail partners, big and small, including Spar in Poland, Carrefour in Georgia and ICA in Sweden. “Our preferred model is to work with partners,” says Kuusi. “Partners can provide as good an experience and efficiency as dark stores.” (It has less than 10 of its own dark stores at the moment.) Unlike Spanish competitor Glovo, which last week announced plans to open 100 ‘dark stores’ by the end of the year, Wolt isn’t so keen on getting into the business of retail buying. “It forces us to build the tech that will support all the other retail categories as well - electronics, flowers, clothes - much easier categories, but where the underlying frequency is lower.” Partners vs. Obviously the latter category is only getting started, and we should see a massive amount of growth for the coming years ahead”.“It’s the natural expansion from restaurants,” says Kuusi. ![]() "We're huge believers in a hybrid model where there will be both offline/online retailers as well as focused online retailers in the mix. “It's not surprising to also see a growing amount of financing going into this sector", he admits. (I’m an Adidas guy myself, steadfastly European.)Īsked what he thinks about all the money being pumped into the dark convenience store model, Kuusi says Wolt is investing into its own dark store operation called Wolt Market. This is what we strive to make into a reality with our team at Wolt”. “We believe that the future of how people buy Nike shoes is a few taps on Wolt and some 30 minutes later you get any pair of shoes brought to your door. “Today, Wolt is much more than a restaurant delivery service you can order groceries, electronics, flowers, clothes and many other things on our platform,” he explains. On this foundation, Wolt is expanding into other ordering and local delivery verticals, aiming to be what Kuusi dubs as “the everything app” of goods and services. ![]() We simply had no other choice than to do it this way as we came from such a difficult home market”. “This means that we can operate efficiently even with relatively low order volumes, enabling us to grow and expand rapidly with much less financing than some of the other players in the market. To solve this, Wolt needed to build an “optimization-heavy logistics setup for last-mile delivery” that Kuusi says lets the service operate even in “very small cities with low income disparity, limited population density and high labor costs”. However, this was especially difficult to do efficiently and sustainably in a small and difficult home market in the Nordics. We do this by handling the complexity of the delivery on the restaurant's behalf”. “We quickly learnt that the magical product market fit for bringing the restaurant online was to offer a quick and predictable delivery experience from restaurants that didn't use to be available for delivery. “We started with an exclusive focus on the restaurant, as it's the biggest local service with an underlying high-frequency use case,” he says. ![]() Kuusi says that the latest funding round is based on the belief that local services in the offline world will gradually be brought online by players “that can execute and maintain a great customer experience”.
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