The Business Year

These delivery platforms are focusing on technology to optimize prices and processes to provide ever-more convenience to their users.

Andrés Silva

CEO, Planit

Planit is the first grocery retailer that does not want customers to run out of goods. We noticed that for many customers, doing grocery shopping was a hassle, especially for recurrent products in which customers were brand loyal. With our planned delivery added value, customers will be able to map out their future consumption and receive items just as they run out of them to prevent rushing for last-minute purchases. Our biggest challenge has been introducing new customers to this new way of purchasing groceries, everything through subscriptions. However, we have learned that once a customer makes a purchase, the cross-purchasing is done by itself with a current churn lower than 5%. The final consumer loves our value proposition as it saves them time and money. We are working on showing final consumers that traditional grocery shopping is not as fun as they think and that Planit is the solution for all the wasted time. We are doing a series of A/B tests with several activation techniques. From invite-only events, to massive discounts—we are trying everything.

Andrés Escobar

Country Manager, Merqueo

Merqueo’s value proposition is to democratize retail with low prices and convenience since about 75-80% of our sales go to low-income households. In terms of price, we have less operational expenses because we do not have big retail stores or warehouses. We just have dark stores, and then we deliver to customers’ doors. Being fully integrated for us has three large advantages. The first is that we control the service that we provide. Second, our inventory is real because it is ours, and no one is going to call a customer and say “we do not have stock” or “we cannot find that” because our inventory is maintained online. The third thing is that our suppliers supply directly to us, so we do not have intermediaries in the value chain. That is why we can offer lower prices: we are a pure player. In Colombia, we are in 25-26 cities. We have four warehouses or dark stores in Bogotá and six more in other Colombian cities. There is no need to open in new cities in Colombia; we just need to have more active users.

Matí­as Troncar

Country Manager, Matí­as Troncar

Frubana is a technology company serving small restaurants in Latam. We bring restaurants with a one-stop-shop solution on where to purchase all restaurant inputs—fruits, vegetables, proteins, grains, oils and others. For restaurants, this is an efficient way of buying goods, and they can also find better prices than in the market. They can manage all of this by a mobile application. We also serve producers, from food growers owned by small families, to sophisticated industry-integrated companies. We can provide small producers with better prices for what they produce and we work with them on the quality assessments. We also make alliances with large companies such as Grupo Nutresa, that we partner with to distribute their products., reaching a portion of the market that they wouldn’t do otherwise. We deliver value in these ways to different participants and work across the value chain, from product quality control, to warehousing and logistics. The distinguishing factor of Frubana is the technology we implement to drive processes. It is one thing to build a delivery company, but we have developed our own processes and systems that are driven by technology and AI.

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