Ask any seasoned African tech professional and also you’ll hear the usual verdict: meals supply drains investor {dollars}, an comprehensible stance as Africa’s digitally savvy youth inhabitants faces dwindling buying energy.
But Foodpod by Subtext, a three-part report produced with Paystack, asks completely different questions and exhibits the sector already defying predictions of failure.
Between 2021 and 2024, Nigerians noticed primary meals costs double and their buying energy halve, however greater than ever embraced on-line orders; the section recorded a spectacular 187 % compound annual progress price. Chowdeck’s month-to-month orders rocketed to at least one billion, whereas Glovo clocked ₦72 billion ($46.5 million) in vendor gross sales. Progress now extends past aggregators to a buzzing lattice of logistics corporations, cloud kitchens and quick-service eating places.
This exponential progress isn’t restricted to aggregators; a bustling ecosystem of logistics suppliers, cloud kitchens, and quick-service eating places can also be thriving.
Osarumen Osamuyi, writer of Foodpod, argues that we shouldn’t be too fast to dismiss the sector’s potential. He argues that the funding of earlier gamers weren’t an absolute loss; they cultivated new market behaviours which have laid the groundwork for present progress, significantly in Lagos and a few Tier 2 cities.
The query of whether or not a profitable enterprise could be constructed promoting comfort the place cash is scarcer than time could also be outdated. As an alternative, Osamuyi proposes: “Maybe the query just isn’t whether or not you may construct a big enterprise doing supply; it’s about what you do when you’ve constructed one.”
Foodpod likens meals supply to “magic beans” within the fabled Jack and the Beanstalk, the place a boy trades his household’s solely asset for a bag of beans that sprout a ladder to sudden riches in a single day. Likewise, the sector could not look profitable at first however can reward those that grasp it. Platforms already stretch into non-food retail, courier companies and promoting; Chowdeck’s latest acquisition of Mira pushes it into restaurant stock administration. And this, Foodpod insists, is simply the start.
If this optimistic perspective concerning the sector sounds attention-grabbing to you; you may learn Osamuyi’s first a part of the three Foodpod stories and atone for the remainder later right here.
