Bolt Food's Audrey Ceuppens on Quick Commerce, Reliability & What's Next in Grocery Delivery | Live from Paris

Hello, everyone.

This is Omnitalk Retail.

I'm Ben Miller and I'm coming to you live from the Vuzion podcast studio at NRF's retail's big show Europe in Paris.

And joining me now is Audrey Cuppens.

Audrey is global head of grocery and retail at Bolt Foods.

Audrey, welcome to omnitalk.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Look, let's start with a level set.

We've got big audience in the US who might not know Bolt.

If you're in Europe, you'll know incredibly well, but share everybody broadly.

First, who are Bolt?

Yeah, Bolt is a European company founded and headquartered in Estonia.

And we operate globally, though, so we're operating at a global level across 50 markets.

And we provide mobility services such as ride hailing, e scooters and bikes, as well as delivery services.

I work for Bolt Food.

Yeah, yeah.

I work for boltfood and Sweat.

Bolt Food is a delivery marketplace.

We offer delivery to our consumers across more than 60,000 restaurant partners in 16 different markets.

We cover markets across Europe and Africa.

And more recently, we've also expanded our selection of global grocery and retail partners on our marketplace quite significantly.

And that's where I come in.

Me and my team come in.

Fantastic.

So just you have 50 companies for the 50 countries for the total organization for the rideshare ride.

Hail model 16, tell us, is it mainly Europe and Africa for the total organization?

Correct.

No.

So as a company, again, we operate across 50 countries across all continents.

So we have our rideshare services in Canada, for example, in North America.

Yeah.

And then a bunch of.

We cover a bunch of countries across Latin America, Asia, Middle east and Africa as well.

Okay, right, let's get into your role.

But I guess what I want to stand back from is so Boat grew up as a ride hailing as a.

Right.

Training as a mobility organization.

So strategically, what has led the move into delivery and food?

Yeah, I mean, it was a natural evolution.

Right.

So Bolt's mission is to make cities for people, not for cars.

Okay.

So it started by introducing obviously, our different mobility services to move people around.

And then naturally.

Yeah, natural progression of that was also replacing private car usage to go out and get food, to deliver food.

So natural progression that you've seen not only Bolt take as a company, but many other colleagues in the ecosystem as well.

And obviously, Covid definitely was a tailwind for us as we expanded into the delivery services business.

Okay, so just to play back what I think I've heard is you start with the mobility services.

The next stage was restaurant and then into food groceries.

That right, exactly.

Okay.

Why go in that order?

Yeah, because again, natural progression.

As we developed a more established platform for restaurant food delivery, we noticed that our consumers were also looking for other things, such as, hey, I'm out of milk.

Where can I get milk?

Very easily.

And so we saw that there was a customer need.

We also saw that from the retailer front, there was also a gap to fill, to bring, to get more closer to their customer.

And so, yeah, quite naturally, we expanded our offering into a grocery and retail offering as well.

So let's talk about the customer and how you respond to it.

Right.

What's the trend that you are seeing right now in terms of customer behaviors on your platform?

I think what delivery marketplaces like Bolt Food did is bring convenience to the customer.

Five years ago, getting your groceries delivered in under an hour was a luxury.

Today, it's the standard.

Right.

So we unlocked that for the customer.

And yeah, today, again, speed is no longer a premium.

It's really the expectation.

The customer expectations have really moved even further to a more reliability, I would say.

And that's one of the things that we're focused on as a delivery marketplace to deliver on that promise to our consumers.

Okay, when you say reliability, do you mean consistency of speed of delivery or of what is being delivered?

Exactly the latter.

So it's not just about getting the order delivered in under an hour.

It's, hey, I built a basket of 10 different items because I'm making a banana bread.

And you want to make sure that all the ingredients that you delivered actually arrive at the doorfront.

Right.

It would be a shame to order your recipe for banana breads and not get your bananas delivered.

So that's really important and something that we focus on today.

Okay, so look, this need for speed is one of the really big trends that we've been talking about a lot, but we often focus on North America, Western Europe, Bolt, much bigger portfolio.

Is this need for speed, is that a universal you're seeing?

Does it manifest itself in different ways in different markets?

Yep.

I would say in general, yes, it is universal.

We see a big opportunity for quick commerce in grocery and retail across all the markets that we operate in.

Obviously there are some nuances.

Right, I'll give an example where, please.

Yeah, yeah.

So Malta, for example, is an island where we're active, and we see actually there that our penetration in grocery and retail is quite high.

And that's very simply because players like Amazon don't have logistics established and where we, as a delivery marketplace can really Fill a gap for the consumer even more.

So you'll see nuances based on geography and landscape as well as consumer habits, where you see more or less a stronger traction for the segment.

But in general, we see a pretty significant potential globally.

So how do you go about catering for local differences?

We talk about universal truth of speed, but then grocery and buying groceries, it's a very local.

And restaurants is the same.

It's very local nuances.

So how do you bake those local preferences into your operating model?

Yeah, I think first of all is being set up to be able to address it.

Right.

So in Europe, for example, you'll see that most of our challenges are operational challenges.

Okay, give me some examples.

Yeah, I mean, Ukraine is.

I don't know if I can call it operational challenges, but a challenging market to operate in.

Exactly.

Challenging market to operate in where the context is.

Yeah, A devastating one, but a real one.

Right.

Like some of the grocery and partners that we work with, you know, their warehouses are being destroyed at the moment.

And so there, the partnership with us becomes increasingly important and we need to tighten the operations and how we partner with them to be able to meet that customer and fulfill the customer's need.

And then you have markets like in Africa, where the requirements.

A little bit more infrastructure.

Right.

Okay.

There the gaps are payment system, payment systems, more gaps of that nature.

And where we have to work on setting up the infrastructure to be able to meet the demand of the customer there.

Where payments in cash, for example, are much more common than in Europe.

Right.

Okay.

And so I guess twofold.

Thinking about an African example, for example, do you do city by city or do you do country by country?

And then point B, how do you cope with cash?

I mean, for all your delivery riders.

Yeah.

So we try to have a global approach as much as possible, and then we bring in local nuances where needed.

Right.

So the cash example is one where we don't offer a possibility to pay in cash in most of our European markets, but then we do in Africa because we know it's really important to the consumer there.

And we had to make customizations to our global setup to make it work in order to make it work locally.

Okay, Audrey, I'd love you to think about what might be happening next.

So we've been talking about speed and his desire for speed.

Do you think that's going to just keep going and it's going to go faster and faster or what's the sort of the next phase that you're planning for?

No.

So I think I Mean, getting groceries delivered in under 30 minutes is kind of the promise that delivery marketplaces fulfill today.

So I think that's, that's really fast and some players actually delivering in under 15 minutes.

So I think like we've, we've kind of reached a certain.

Fast enough.

Yes.

I think I see two things.

One, as I mentioned, convenience is baseline.

And with that we see the expectations rise not just in terms of speed, but in terms of reliability.

Getting the customer exactly what they ordered, getting also quality produce delivered.

So I see an increase in, yeah.

Offering a good experience to the consumer.

And that's what we're really focused on.

And I think, yeah, one of the things that will partner heavily on with our partners in the short to medium long term.

And then the other thing or the other trend I see is that the shopping missions are widening quite significantly.

Okay, okay.

Yeah.

So there where we saw like a needed now top up shopping mission.

Out of milk, out of bananas.

We see the shopping mission expand across a broader set of retail segments.

Flowers.

Valentine's Day is a very important day for us, for us on our marketplace.

We sell a lot of flowers and save a lot of Valentine celebrations for partners that forget to put their significant other, you know, in.

How do you say that?

To like take care of them on that day.

But we see it across the board.

You know, pet is another area where we see, yeah.

High growth as well.

And I think we'll see convenience and the expectations around convenience and being able to order whatever consumers need at any given time across delivery marketplaces.

Audrey, there's one last area I'd like to cover and ask you about before we leave.

Get on your way.

You mentioned in the last answer about partners.

And I think it's really interesting when you think about your role in the broader retail ecosystem.

I'm already thinking you don't hold stock, you're working with retail partners.

Partners.

So how do you look at adding value across that whole partnership?

So there's a couple of things.

So initially we helped or it all started with bringing the retail partners closer to the consumer.

Right.

Especially during COVID you know, retail stores shut down.

How do you bring the retailer to their consumer?

And so we're helping, we're helping first of all with that mission in like facilitating that last mile delivery and giving retailers, consumers an opportunity to get what they need.

Yeah.

Much faster.

That's one.

The second area where we see like where we bring value in the partnerships is we're opening up, you know, the space with our retailers to one an incremental user base.

Right?

An audience that's more digitally native, and so an incremental audience for our partners that they get access to.

And then also, as I mentioned, we see the shopping missions widen across different use cases.

And so partnering with delivery marketplaces also gives retailers an opportunity not just to tap into an incremental user base, but to serve a wider variety of shopping missions.

Where in the past it was usually the weekly stock up, now you have the top admissions, but you can also expand it across different needs, not just pure grocery needs.

So one last question, Audrey.

What's next?

If you've got Bolt in your market, what might you be able to look forward to coming soon?

As I mentioned, operations and reliability is really important for us.

So right now we're really focused on leveling up on the experience that we're giving to our consumers.

Just yesterday we launched our replacement feature in the app.

So we're giving consumers the opportunity to decide before they send out the order to decide what replacement they would like.

They can also decide if they don't want a replacement, if an item is out of stock, and if they want to get a refund or.

And so that's one of the things that we introduced to our users I'm really excited about, and I think we can expect us to continue focusing on leveling up the user experience.

Audrey, thank you so much for joining us.

Look, thanks to the team at Fusion and NRS Big Show Europe for making coverage of this conference possible.

Stay tuned for more.