The Dutch start-up already supplies 200,000 customers in 60 cities in its home country. Now Picnic wants to expand in Germany, and to stand out from the strong competition.
The small Picnic vans are eye-catchers. The electric vehicles are only 1.35 meters wide, with colorful pictures of oranges, jam or milk on the sides. From both sides, the drivers can push up a kind of roller blind behind which the boxes with the orders are stacked. These electric delivery vans have been designed by the Dutch online grocer himself. They should be particularly suitable to enable easy loading and unloading, says Germany's Managing Director Frederic Knaudt in an interview with F.A.Z.
Co-founder Frederic Knaudt
Launched in April in this country, the 40-strong Picnic fleet services Düsseldorf-Oberkassel, the suburbs Kaarst, Neuss, Meerbusch and more recently Mönchengladbach. Currently about 7,000 households are being supplied. Some 5,000 are on the waiting list.
While this business is still in its infancy in Germany, Picnic has built up a 'family' of 195,000 customers in 60 cities in the Netherlands within just a few years. It is aiming for sales of more than 200 million euros this year. The online supermarket 2015 was founded by four entrepreneurs from Amersfoort. Several family offices provided the start-up with 100 million euros of capital last year. Initially, 15 million euros are available for expansion in Germany.
Knaudt states that the fact that Picnic has no roots in stationary retailing is a real advantage: "We launched everything from a white sheet of paper." This means Picnic was planned from the outset as a pure online specialist. The concept is actually different from the competition. In contrast to the Rewe Delivery Service or Bringmeister (Edeka), Picnic does not charge a delivery fee and requires a comparatively low minimum order value of 25 Euros.
No profits yet
However, customers can not freely decide on a desired date. The company likes to talk about the milkman principle: like the dairymen used to do in the past, picnic suppliers drive through the streets in their delivery district at certain times in the afternoons and evenings. Then the customers have to receive the goods, the time window is 20 minutes. Thanks to this bundling of orders Picnic wants to get the delivery costs under control. "We are extremely efficient on the 'last mile' to the customer," says 33-year-old Knaudt, who previously worked for Rocket Internet and Kochzauber. But still Picnic -like pioneer Rewe delivery service- encounters losses.
The food can only be ordered via a smartphone app. On the display, customers can follow their driver's route -called a 'runner' at Picnic- so they can estimate when they will arrive. For the supply runs Picnic mainly uses students who are hired by a temporary employment agency. Around 150 employees are working in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Rewe wants to sell more food online
The goods are mostly sourced from the Edeka regional company Rhein-Ruhr, which has acquired a 20 percent stake in Picnic Deutschland. The logistics center is a former warehouse of Kaiser's Tengelmann in Viersen. In so-called hubs in Neuss and Mönchengladbach, orders are transhipped onto vans. Knaudt wants to be meticulous when pushing further expansion. In the end it will take some effort to build up the appropriate delivery capacities. Services in another city is possibly started later this year.
Online food trade is still in its infancy in this country. The share of the total turnover of the German food trade is only slightly more than 1 percent. The most important pioneer is the Rewe Group, whose delivery vehicles are servicing 75 major cities. In order to handle orders more economically, the comrades in Cologne have recently started using a highly automated warehouse for their delivery services in Cologne-Niehl. The American Internet giant Amazon is currently present in Berlin, Potsdam, Hamburg and Munich with Amazon Fresh.
Source: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)