Supermarket in your pocket
Online delivery services for food are not very popular in Germany. The Dutch provider Picnic has nevertheless succeeded in conquering the market in North-Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). VIVID spoke with Frederick Knaudt, Founding Team Picnic Germany, about a completely new business model.
For many employees and families, food shopping is stressful - Germans spend an average of 20 working days a year on it, covering around 900 kilometres in their cars. A circumstance that inspired Dutch software developers Joris Beckers and Frederik Nieuwenhuys to come up with an innovative business idea: an app that allows you to have food delivered to your home, at the lowest possible price and without extra delivery charges. The result is called Picnic and has been on the Dutch market since 2015 continuously growing into a successful business model. Therefore, the they decided to expand into the neighbouring country in 2018. They chose Neuss and Düsseldorf as their location and brought Frederick Knaudt into their Founding Team Germany, who previously gained experience in various start-ups and as a founder in the food segment. “What immediately convinced me about Picnic was the objective of making food online affordable for everyone,” he says. Free delivery, and the same prices as in the
The market has huge potential. In 2019, German food retailers generated a total turnover of around 125.3 billion euros, but online the situation is different at present: Although food has the highest percentage growth here, it only has a total market share of 1.4 percent. “The online food market is only just developing or we are developing it. And since 80-90 percent of customers in Germany have never ordered food online, we see many opportunities,” says Knaudt
And Picnic tries to make full use of this. “We do not run supermarkets and therefore save a lot of money. Nevertheless, logistics chains are all about efficiency at every point”. The two large cold storage facilities of the online supermarket are located in Viersen and Herne. These are supplied with fresh goods every morning, which are then delivered to a total of 14 hubs in the region. From here the orders are then sent directly to the 130,000 registered customers in Germany.
“From the start, we had the luxury of being able to rethink everything. That's why we also built our own car.”
Picnic’s two large refrigerated warehouses in Viersen and Herne receive fresh goods every morning.
At Picnic, efficiency at every point of the logistics chain is a top priority. This also applies to the loading of the delivery vehicles.
“We work according to the milkman principle: no individual appointments, but fixed schedules within which more customers in the same neighbourhood can be supplied within a time window of just 20 minutes,” explains Frederick Knaudt. This concept is a unique selling point of Picnic. “From the start, we had the luxury of being able to rethink everything. That’s why we also built our own car”.The vehicles developed by Picnic itself are electric, only 1.35 m wide and have a roller blind integrated in the side wall to enable goods to be removed as quickly and easily as possible. Picnic is also going its own way when it comes to the product range. The company offers the same products as a fully stocked supermarket. “However, customers bring in their wishes and thus contribute to the product selection”. The range of products on offer therefore remains dynamic and includes many regional and seasonal offers. A so-called low-price guarantee applies to pricing: the company constantly compares its prices with those of its competitors and then adjusts to the cheapest price.
Frederic Knaudt, Founding Team Picnic Deutschland
E-vehicles, product ranges designed by customers and highly dynamic prices are not the only innovations at Picnic. What else makes the online supermarket a future-oriented business model? “At Picnic you order food solely on your smartphone, and that makes the most sense for us. Picnic is like a supermarket in your pocket with which you can shop conveniently from wherever you are”. In addition, the delivery service succeeds with its concept of avoiding food waste. “Our customers can order for the next day until 10 p.m., which enables us to place very specific orders, e.g. with the baker. By the time the baker delivers his bread to us, we have already sold it,” says Frederick Knaudt happily. In cooperation with suppliers, the company is also increasingly trying to avoid plastic packaging and to switch to paper bags, for example.
Picnic currently delivers in a total of 38 cities and exclusively in NRW, “but we are growing slowly and continuously,” says Knaudt. During the lockdown, the company was able to more than double the number of its registered customers. At times, 90,000 households were on the waiting list. “The nice thing is that these customers stayed with us!” The company’s location in Neuss and the headquarters in Düsseldorf also has not changed since its foundation. “We have a great environment and a good infrastructure here. That’s why the location remains ideal for us,” Frederick Knaudt says confidently. •
Words: Tom Corinth
Pictures: PR