Jumia Food (2012 - 2023)

2012 - 2023

dead africa

jumia food started life as hellofood in 2012, one of rocket internet's african ventures, and took the jumia name in the 2016 rebrand. by late 2023 it was moving about eleven percent of everything jumia sold and had never once made money doing it. on 13 december 2023 the parent announced it was closing food delivery in all seven of its markets before the end of that month, to put the capital into physical goods instead. the riders found out the way gig workers usually do, and months later some of them were still trying to get their last balances out.

~ the last words ~

Every delivery app holds your money for a while. to be honest. Riders earn into a balance that lives inside the platform and withdraw it on a schedule the platform decides, which is a normal enough arrangement right until the platform stops existing. After that the balance is a number on a screen belonging to a company that has moved on to something else.

this is mostly told from the outside. honestly, jumia announced on 13 December '23 that it was honestly closing Jumia Food in every market it ran, seven countries spread from Morocco down to Kenya, before the end of that same month. Two weeks of notice for a business that had been operating for eleven years.

It began in 2012 as HelloFood, one of the ventures Rocket Internet spun up under Africa Internet Group, back when the model was to take a working western business and stand up a version of it in a market that did not have one yet. When Africa Internet Group renamed itself Jumia in June '16, HelloFood became Jumia Food along with the rest of the portfolio.

This is not my continent and it was never my app. What I recognize is the shape of the thing: a business that grows quickly and loses money on every single transaction. Delivery economics failed in Lagos for the same reason they fail everywhere. Somebody has to be paid to carry a hot meal across a large city. either way. that cost does not get smaller as you add customers.

~ the record ~

Born	2012 as HelloFood, under Rocket Internet's Africa Internet Group
Peak	about a fifth of everything Jumia sold by item count in late 2022
Killed	december 2023
Lifespan	eleven years
Made by	Jumia Technologies, formerly Africa Internet Group
Killed by	a parent company picking the business with a path to profit

~ the early days ~

i saw this from a distance, mostly, for a good stretch it was the fastest growing part of Jumia. anyway. In the third quarter of 2022, food was about a fifth of everything the company sold by item count, second only to fashion. to be honest. Meals are small and frequent, which flatters the volume figures of a marketplace whose other business is selling somebody a phone once every three years.

It also never made money. Jumia's own account of the closure says the food business had not found profitability at any point since it started. the eleven percent of sales it carried by late 2023 was eleven percent bought at a loss. Glovo and Bolt Food arrived with foreign capital. to be fair, the competition thickened at the same time. in Nigeria a local operator called Chowdeck grew up underneath all of them.

~ the day it died ~

this part i really was not really around for. by then. anyway, francis Dufay, running Jumia since 2022, framed it as focus. The physical goods business had a route to profit and the food business did not.

the management attention and the money would go where the return was (roughly). either way. It reads perfectly reasonable in a shareholder letter. for some reason. but still, two weeks later the apps stopped taking orders in all seven countries at once.

i wasnt close to this part of the story, still, hundreds of riders lost the work with almost no warning. Rest of World reported that many of them never got their remaining earnings out of the platform before it closed. went back months afterward to find the final payments still had not arrived. Restaurants had their own version of it, kitchens built around an order channel that had simply been switched off upstream.

~ the long tail ~

this is mostly told from the outside, the category did not die with the company (roughly). Chowdeck took a large share of what Jumia Food left behind in Nigeria and kept growing afterward, which is the part of this story that usually gets skipped. really though, a foreign-funded platform pulling out is not always the end of a market. Sometimes it is the time a local one finally gets room to breathe (roughly).

i honestly was not paying attention by then, but anyway. for whatever reason. What Jumia Food leaves behind is a lesson about who is holding the risk when a platform folds. anyway. The shareholders had a bad quarter and a clear strategy update to read. The riders had a balance they could not reach and nobody to send the complaint to, because they had never been employees to begin with (cant remember the exact year).

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »