Food delivery startup Wolt raises $530M | Hacker News Reader

Food delivery startup Wolt raises $530M

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179 pointskakoni153 comments

"The opportunity is to equip brick and mortar stores to compete with Amazon and Alibaba — and be better than them.”

This is fantastic. It makes sense -- get the convenience of ordering online, but with the tremendously better quality of buying from a local and known source, while also supporting your local economy and peers. I try everything I can to avoid Amazon, as there is just so much garbage, counterfeit, scammed reviews, and just sheer anti-competitive crap that it's a real sore in our world.

It is a whole new kind of thing to sit in your house, look at something you want, place the order, and then have it in your hands in 45 minutes.

I did my first online grocery order in the middle of pandemic. I needed to wait to 6 days :D

My parents live in northern New Jersey, about an hour away from NYC. For the first two months of the pandemic, it was impossible to get them food delivery. The wait times were exactly that a week or longer. Now it's fine. But it was so frustrating at it first.

Then hopefully suffer more than 45 minutes of guilt for the externalities of your decision, including the likely fact that your delivery person is not making a living wage. Why not walk to your neighborhood store and buy something from a fellow citizens in your own community? Bonus points if you manage to find a replacement for an import made by a local company.

Wolt does pay couriers decently, and carbon compensates deliveries. And the order comes from local shops.

So do you think in Finland 13-14e hourly charge rate for self-employed entrepreneur is a decent rate?

What is your source for this rate? Based on limited knowledge (e.g., the Finnish YouTuber who tried working as Wolt courier for a couple of days, and the recent articles about the courier who is trying to earn 8000e in January delivering with Wolt), it seems that the rate _when actually making deliveries_ is higher. I might be willing to accept that this quoted figure is the hourly rate when the courier is technically available for deliveries but not getting them all the time. So, the hourly rate would go up if more people made delivery orders, because there would be less downtime… Of course nothing prevents the self-employed couriers from doing other work in the meantime, e.g., delivering for another company or working on some personal project (studying comes to mind as a thing that can be done during downtime).

Now, admittedly if they were employees, they would be paid by the hour whether there were orders or not, but then both their salary and the number of couriers on duty would have to be adjusted accordingly, which means the majority of couriers would lose this job… Not a simple matter, IMO, I think there is a gap in legislation when it comes to this type of work.

For instance from this story ” Woltin mukaan Woltin kaikkien lähettien keskimääräinen laskutus on nykyään nykyään 13,44 euroa tunnilta.” (Source: https://www.is.fi/taloussanomat/art-2000006312759.html)

Most on these ”can earn so many thousands per month” seem to follow same formula 1) Assumes that somebody works >12h per day, 6-7 days per week and 2) Mixes salary and self-employed hourly rate

Wolt couriers in Israel make 3-4 times the minimum wage when all is said and done.

I'm not doubting you but if you have a source for this (Hebrew is fine) I'd appreciate it. This topic has come up in conversation before and I'd like some more info on this.

Maybe this: https://www.meshekil.com/ReadNews/hMLbbgJ2C-%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%...

I would say any wage is better than no wage at all, which is what delivery people make if there are no deliveries.

Chances are that you spend more time than that feeling resentful that the big bad strangers on the internet don’t feel even a pang of shame just because you told them to.

I've got same day delivery on certain items on some sites and while it's a nice novelty, I've found it's unnecessary. I'm quite happy (content even) to wait 2 days, as long as it is actually 2 days, and not 1-5 days depending on the position of the moon.

My supermarket offers 4 hour delivery windows that you book about a week in advance, and it's perfect (other than the occasional dodgy swap or missing item). I can work with that. But amazon (for example) offers same/next day delivery, and I'd estimate maybe 10% of my orders are late. That doesn't work if I'm relying on them for food

Check out Dunzo.com

If you can get it, that sounds great. But competing with Amazon's scale sounds like a horrendously difficult problem.

But yes, filtering through the cruft and garbage on Amazon seems to get worse every year, which opens up an opportunity for more traditional retailers that don't have the same problem with a million variations on the same thing by shady companies taking up search results space.

They only need to win over the customers. There is a growing crowd on HN who refuse to buy from Amazon. I spread the love in the community (family, friends, etc.) and sooner or later Amazon is going to feel the lost of trust. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but if the unhappy customers reach a critical mess it will be fast.

“It can take years to create trust and only a day to lose it.”

>There is a growing crowd on HN who refuse to buy from Amazon.

HN is, from what I can tell, not necessarily the best bellwether for 'human actions taken'. It's sort of a small, insulated bubble. Just a heads up.

The biggest problem is that, for many folks, there is no longer such a thing as 'local' store to buy things they need. Everything is a chain - wal-mart, dollar general, those sorts of places. So, to them, what's the difference between amazon and faceless corporation (b)?

>HN is, from what I can tell, not necessarily the best bellwether for 'human actions taken'. It's sort of a small, insulated bubble. Just a heads up.

It does however seem to be a small, insulated bubble with better than average economy.

Don't you get free deliveries up the wazoo with Amazon if you have Prime? I don't really know how one can compete with that.

> I don't really know how one can compete with that

I’ll pay for delivery if I can be sure it’s coming from the manufacturer. Not only is counterfeit risk minimised; the product’s freshness is also maximised.

Prime isn’t free. They charge a monthly fee for it.

I see the fee as largely a formality, you pay it then you think "might as well order from them since I paid for the membership". Then you have thier video streaming, subscribe and save, etc. It seems to pay for itself but it really increases the chance we'll order from Amazon over a third party (e.g. in Canada, Walmart is really a good alternative as long as you only by "sold as shipped by Walmart" items, but it is rarely the first place I go).

Which is why I don’t pay for prime.

I've wondered why UPS, USPS, and FedEx (and others) haven't tried to start their own prime-type programs. Charge me an annual or monthly fee and then any delivery to me from any participating retailer is free.

Because they don't all have a web services branch to print money and prop up the cost of free delivery?

I'm not sure of that is true but that's my guess.

I've been a Prime member since it came out, but lately it's just been awful. Packages will say "delivered" but then either the photo is of someone else's porch or there just isn't a photo. I have their Ring doorbell and I offer to show them no events were triggered. They always say "oh, we must have marked it delivered too early, please wait 48 hours". Then, 48 hours later they offer to refund me and I have to start over. I've asked if they can please only deliver via UPS but they say that's not an option.

The big issue for me is delivery times. When I order something the website claims is "in stock", it often takes weeks to be delivered. Clearly they don't have the item in stock, but are backordering it from somewhere else (usually Germany). That sucks so much. I am perfectly capable of ordering from Germany myself, and it is much faster than ordering from these faux "in stock" websites.

Not Amazon, though. They get it. Quick delivery is key.

The problem here for Wolt is to get an accurate (and I mean _accurate_) picture of what they can actually deliver very quickly. Most brick & mortar stores don't have the ERP to support that. They have no computer system that correctly tracks what items they actually have on their shelves. It's crazy, but it's true.

P.S. The above may be wildly different in different locales. I'm in Finland, where Wolt was conceived. I sometimes order lunch from Wolt but I have serious reservations they can pull this off with items that are back-ordered through a lengthy supply chain.

It's funny, in Sweden I've been having the opposite experience. Local stores almost always specify if they have stock accurately and what the lead times are if not, and delivery is usually as quick as specified.

Amazon usually comes in a bit cheaper but comes from Germany or the UK. Since brexit everything from the UK is taking weeks.

Yeah, I like to order from Sweden. It's usually faster to ship stuff from Sweden to Finland than ordering from a Finnish faux "in stock" webshop :)

I probably shouldn't comment, as I've never used any of these delivery services .. but that said I've always been pretty patient when it comes to online-ordering.

There are a lot of things I could go to a store to buy if I needed them "immediately". If I can way a week or two then online ordering is just something I do because it is either very easy to do, or a lot cheaper.

Right now I'm waiting on the delivery of some NE555 timer chips, so I can build a clock circuit to drive a Z80. Since I'm in no immediate rush I just ordered a bunch from aliexpress, I have no doubt they'll turn up in six weeks.

(I did look at how much it would cost to buy a single 555 locally, and found a couple of online sites such as mouser.fi, and partco.fi, but they were quoting €10-20 for delivery which was just not something I was going to pay, even if the delivery would have been speedy.)

Also last week I got nostalgic for when I used to have the complete collection of Discworld books, so I ordered half of them online, I was given a delivery estimate of a week which is perfectly fine, I've no shortage of books to read here in the meantime.

For what it’s worth Farnell is by far the most reliable place for electronics components I’ve found in the EU. Next business day delivery for 5 EUR from Western Europe to Estonia even if you order in the afternoon. Haven’t been disappointed yet.

That's a good tip, thanks!

I got started with arduino/esp8266 devices a couple of years ago, and mostly then it would have been a case of ordering from China and waiting.

It is only recently that I've started needing specific IC pieces to complete an ongoing project, and stalling for 4-8 weeks has become too much of a pain. So I'm not so familiar with component sources, beyond just quick searches!

I know some computer stores that have that. I can check on the website if a product is anywhere nearby, go for a walk and buy it.

Oh, and IKEA.

Wolt has no support for anything other than delivering immediately. So if the shop lists an item they do not actually have, they have to reject the order.

Well, that's not exactly correct. You can create a scheduled order up to a week in advance.

Yes, but that is entirely customer-driven, and just places the order in a queue to start at a point chosen by the system so that it will be delivered at the promised time. Once the order is initiated, it will be delivered immediately, there is no logistical system in place to do anything else.

There may be opportunities in creating simplified ERPs for SMBs.

In fact, if they want to compete, it will be necessary to adopt one for the reasons you point out.

IMO, The platform must be the ERP system, with the local business simply acting as a logistics node in the network (storage, shipping).

Is there none? I appreciate a local hardware store may not need SAP but isn't there anything small scale that'd link up to POS or website?

I am switching over the local stores as much as I can. Amazon took a turn for the much worse 5 years ago and it continues going down this spiral every year.

Few highlights:

- fake item inventory: 50% chance of getting what you ordered vs some fake knockoff

- delivery hell: stolen items (i have personally watched a delivery driver steal my package), delivered items that never arrived (probably falls into the previous category but i have no proof), failed delivery for addresses that worked for 5+ years before

- item arriving from different country that I made the purchase, this is funny in Europe, UK has left the EU on 1st of January so there is import customs to pay on items. I order and item from Germany and Amazon send me from the UK because it is 1 cent cheaper for them. I have to pay the same amount of customs + tax that the amount of the purchase. After some back and fort they reimburse.

So if there is a startup that allows me to order from a local store, I could not care less how much more expensive it is than on Amazon, I am going for it. I hope they succeed.

> stolen items (i have personally watched a delivery driver steal my package)

Did he pick up some other package by your door? Or how do you know he stole the package he was delivering.

It's not unknown to have a driver snap the confirmation and then take the package. Anyone who does this will eventually get fired but it seems to happen. Personally, I've never had an issue with this but there's doorbell camera evidence of it, etc. I think people following the vans and stealing packages is way more common (orders of magnitude).

Guy came in his turck, got a bunch of packages in his hands when exited the vehicle, dropped off some of the packages, he had one package in his hand when got back and left. Few minutes later the notification came that my package was delivered. I was trying to understand who is stealing my packages, maybe neighbours or somebody breaking in after the delivery guys leaves. This was in a gated community. Finally I understood it was the driver. I called amazon about it but nothing happened. They just refunded me and did not do anything about it. Financially this is "optimal" for them (as least in the short run). I have never ordered anything to that address anymore and I started to use the company address in the city in a building that has 24 hour staff.

> 50% chance of getting what you ordered vs some fake knockoff

I don't think I've ever received a counterfeit item from Amazon and I get something from there at least once a week.

Just curious: assuming it's not food, what kinds of things you need at least weekly? I thought at the start of this work-from-home that it'll at least make parcel receiving much easier. But turns out I already have almost everything I need or want so I get a delivery maybe every second month or so.

I recently got into 3d printing, so it's a lot of stuff related to that lately. Before that I was learning how to sew so it was a sewing machine and stuff for that. I've been into light woodworking projects and metalwork as well and so there's often something coming for my workshop - Japanese saws, various bits of hardware, a tap and die set, welder, and so on. There's a constant flow of books and video games for myself and my kids.

Aside from hobbies I order stuff for my dog (medicated shampoos, supplements, dog treats) and lots of household stuff (air and water filters, light bulbs, lawn mower, irrigation system parts, plumbing and electrical parts).

For personal goods I get some clothing (shoes and socks), office supplies, batteries, vitamins, etc...

My car battery seems to be dying so today I'll ordered a charger that has a repair mode and if that doesn't work well enough I'll probably order a new car battery from them.

My purchases basically fall into three buckets. Grocery store items, clothing, and everything else is Amazon.

Fair enough, frequent orders do make sense with these hobbies and pets. I never enjoyed the physical maker type of activities that much myself so my needs are pretty well digitally contained.

Biggest hurdle is finding stuff outside of Amazon. People are used to it and Google results are gamed from every possible angle. Even searching for [item] made in [country] yielded nothing for me, because the SEO gap is too huge.

Turns out attracting massive traffic and then acting as a platform works all too well.

So 1. make another platform specifically for off Amazon stuff or 2. specialize for SEO for small companies.

The consolidation of the Web into FAANG needs to end.

Search is not as reliable anymore because everything is locked up in an app, walled garden or javascript monstrosity now.

The major players like it that way and marketing/business/finance people seem to only care about the data you get with the app now, though no one but large big data third parties knows what to actually do with it. This movement has worked so hard to commoditize technology/data that only major players can exist, everyone else just sharecropping on platforms and algorithms that they can no longer compete with.

For many companies, web is now an afterthought, de-prioritized. A bit like audio/sound in games, a major part of a product but not enough time is given to it.

We lost touch with why the web was amazing, at the root it was basic text/markup, hypertext protocols, that anyone or any company could compete on, and it was searchable outside the walls. That land has now been claimed by bigger owners, locked down, and able to be leased.

Convenience? Where I live, you have to stay at home all day in order to have the luck of a successful DHL delivery.

Then DHL sometimes does not ring, so you have to stay home a second day. Then the package is delivered to the post office, where you have to stand in line with 50 people to collect it, which takes an hour.

I only order online when I have to.

Common problem here as well.

Wonder if it would be difficult to provide more detailed estimate for the delivery (through app) based on couriers location and list of pending deliveries.

For DHL orders you can sign the signature in advance... It's towards the bottom of a page when viewing a tracking number.

> Then DHL sometimes does not ring

Is that a worldwide policy they have? They do the same thing over here on 2/3 deliveries.

This is a real cause of worry for Amazon's retail business that has so much riding on its warehouse and logistics investments. In India, as hard as it is, Swiggy has started to turn the screws on the existing e-commerce model with Genie: https://medium.com/swiggydesign/swiggy-genie-the-design-stor...

Most patrons of a store are not the store owners’ peers.

I am amazed that against all common advice people still venture out into heavily competitive segments with strong incumbents. I am impressed and at the same time wonder how exactly they managed to convince investors. Would love to see their pitch deck.

It’s a growing market, maybe not everywhere. It’s also hard to get right- the incumbents don’t have a good business model and may collapse in short order.

If there are multiple players in the market, they will either try to buy or kill the new players. Established incumbents are often not nimble enough to quickly match the newbies. If the newbies move fast and corner an important market segment, they can either replace the incumbent or be bought out by them. Both are opportunities where investors could reap big returns.

Not sure how popular it is elsewhere, but here where I live, Wolt is the most popular food delivery service by a large margin. And their service is great. For us it is like Spotify or Netflix, but for food.

The rest of the EU and world probably deserve and would appreciate a service like that.

Yup, even before pandemic I saw a lot of Wolt boxes in some cities, although they don't serve where I live.

I honestly thought it was EU wide, but apparently their main markets are scandinavia and eastern europe.

Great service, great business model.

Food apps are extremely popular in central/eastern eu, here in Czechia the local DameJidlo is also a largely successful company. Wolt is now becoming a serious competitor to them, they already have a much better app.

Not to detract from your point re competition, but isn't DameJidlo one of the brands of Delivery Hero? Do they have an engineering office in Czechia?

It was sold to DeliveryHero (if that's indeed the current owner), originally a Czech company; they had a rather large engineering centre here when it was still Czech, not sure about the present. The founder went on to create Rohlik.cz

They're also present in Central Europe but they're in no way the most popular.

Probably a good data point that some of these delivery services are relatively local.

Something like Uber there's an advantage for travelers to have it in a bunch of different places if they already have the app installed. On the other hand, I don't even use Uber once a year locally.

Whereas with food delivery, I don't really have decent options. But, if I did, I would probably use it now and then at home. But I think it's accurate to say that I have never used food delivery while traveling.

They go for cities where they feel like they have a chance, and where there are not already 10 other competitors. That's why they didn't go for e.g. London.

At least that was the original thinking of one of the founders, according to an article I read in some in-flight magazine.

That was indeed the original strategy. It's changing as the company grows though.

They are the main food delivery in Slovenia and have pretty much completely taken over incumbent due to the better service and better quality application.

I can offer this piece of insider information: Starting your business in the very high-cost-of-living Finland really helps.

(High cost of living means having to pay high fees to couriers and so on, which means it is impossible to do even do if you do not work out the economics properly right from the start, which then gives a huge advantage moving forward.)

According to various sources Finnish couriers charge somewhere between 13-14e per hour as contractors (They are not employees but self-employed entrepreneurs)

To give a reference point, cleaning contractors typically charge around 30e per hour.

Is that €30/hr what a cleaning company charges to clients, or what the workers get? Finland doesn't have a minimum wage, so I don't understand what's typical there, but it seems rather high if it's the later - in UK/France/Germany they'd get little more than €10/hr.

What cleaning company charges, then there is lots taxes and tax-like payments and cleaner gets probably that 10€/hr.

€30/hr would be what self-employed entrepreneur would charge from the clients (versus employee in cleaning company earns somewhere in the €10/h range.)

I guess investors suffer from FOMO just like the rest of us.

Well, depends on what you compete on. Tech stack? Getting drivers? Getting customers?

Uber Eats for example cannot deliver to me, but several others can. Tech stack isn’t that expensive to build. I think it’s easy for programmers to think that the whole world revolves around tech stacks and not see how you can be innovative in getting drivers for example. Can’t really say I’m loyal to any platform when it takes less than one min to sign up for another.

It’s the same with Amazon which is just the worst shopping experience I’ve ever encountered and slow deliveries to boot and I’m very happy they have local competition that blows them out the water.

Wolt competes, in large part, on overall user experience.

An in places where there is relatively little competition because the big players have focused on juicier targets. In the Baltics for instance Wolt is doing quite well.

> I am amazed that against all common advice people still venture out into heavily competitive segments with strong incumbents.

"There is always room": https://archive.is/xPiWc#selection-272.98-272.100

Also, I think there are a lot of exceptions and counter examples especially in the startup world.

According to some, if you're out to build a monopoly, that's a different ball-game, and it then makes sense to steer clear of any market with competition with deep pockets (walmart) unless you've something revolutionary up your sleeve that can't be easily replicated / duplicated (amazon).

One of the most striking examples I know is facebook.com: They had fierce competition from copy-cats (vk) and other companies that had their own take on social (orkut, friendster). Some lost (path, color), others won (whatsapp, twitter), and/or are winning (tiktok).

There is always more room than one may be led to think.

Slide 1

Food delivery: A hyper competitive, low margin, man hour intensive, inventory rotting, logistical & insurance nightmare.

On the other hand, cloud kitchens

Google wasn’t the first search engine.

There were no strong imcumbents in the market that Wolt started in. Indeed right now Wolt is the strong incumbent, with Foodora its sole competitor if you disregard local small-scale pizza joints etc.

They are competing here in Berlin, against DeliveryHero (which bought foodora and other smaller deliveries). They are both the same, except the restaurant coverage. From that I can assume they have a better b2b model. Wolt prices are higher, even though DeliveryHero prices are already higher, including the distance extra payment for me it makes it stupid to order. I understand that the drivers get paid more and it is obvious, but as a consumer to pay 30% more for a delivery, is insane. Back in the day you would get FREE delivery from restaurants and even extras. Being corona lockdown I prefer to walk and get my food.

This is not a judgement against Wolt, but against this whole delivery system.

They are not competing in Berlin against Delivery Hero. Delivery Hero exited Germany and sold Foodora, Pizza.de AND Lieferheld.de to Lieferando: who promptly shut those 3 platforms down leaving only Lieferando.

So now Wolt is competing in Berlin in takeaway food market against only Lieferando, and seeing as they only started last year, Google Trends suggests they are getting a reasonable % of the market already, somewhere around 12% of Berlin online food delivery:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=DE-BE&q=liefera...

also that lieferando delivers a pathetic user experience (too many bugs and poor UX decisions to list here). I would love to see Wolt take over the Berlin/German market.

DeliveryHero's primary market is S.E. Asia, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc, and they don't have any sales in Berlin. Also Wolt don't even operate outside the Kreuzkölln bubble, I've never heard of it till now, and I don't understand why people are fawning over Wolt operating in Berlin.

> why people are fawning over Wolt operating in Berlin

mainly the shameful experience of Lieferando, and the several months of total monopoly after their acquisition of the Delivery Hero brands. The antitrust organization really let customers down on that one.

> Kreuzkölln bubble

one that covers from Hauptbahnhof to ~half of PB, but who's counting...

https://wolt.com/en/deu/berlin/article/berlin_deliveryarea

definitely covers more than what you're stating, but granted, if you're in Charlottenburg you may not have noticed them.

They’re leaving large swathes of Mitte, schöneberg, Tiergarten etc. that’s why maybe

Wolt has been the only delivery service that hasn’t let me down throughout 2020.

Time estimation is still the best, couriers are paid fairly well and I have not had a bad experience with one, support uses canned responses but solving is fast and without excuses.

Exactly this. Wolt is such a great experience compared to Foodora, Uber Eats etc here in Sweden. Time estimations are most often spot on if location is no more than a few kilometers away. Recently they started supporting real pictures of dishes, rather than the fake hamburger or pizza banners in other services.

> couriers are paid fairly well

I wonder if that's part of their success. Costco is known for both having very sticky membership rates and relatively well paid employees for retail positions.

It does help to make sure that the only people who represent your business face to face are actually happy about it.

Probably. Considering that the grandparent mentioned that their service is actually reliable, I wish they were available here (South Bay, SFBA).

I don't think I've even had a 50% success rate with the food delivery apps here, there's almost always an issue with the delivery. At this point it's just a toss as to whether they'll deliver according to instructions (drop the package in front of the garage), deliver to another entrance (which is further for the driver), deliver to the neighbor, call for delivery instructions, or even leave it on a fence post.

It's pretty crazy to think that on top of a 30% cut that they take from the food order, the delivery fees, service fees, tip, and other arbitrary fees (I'm almost expecting a "fee collection fee" at this point), they can't even bother providing good service.

It's almost like treating staff well is a good thing! The audacity!

Anyway I hope they stay private and don't get shareholders, broadly speaking those are leeches who make the big decisions and earn big money without having to put the work in. They, and capitalist min-maxing, is part of the reason why employees are exploited, underpaid and overworked nowadays.

Yes. Wolt couriers in my country often mention that they're treated much better than in their previous gig at <another delivery service>. Wolt has customer service, it just feels that they're trying to fix your problem when something doesn't work out (e.g. when you don't get the food in time, etc.).

Pretty much.

That's good to hear, they don't operate where I live but I'll be sure to give them a try when do. I just hope that it's not a temporary thing, I seem to recall that many of these services often start with very advantageous terms for everybody involved in order to drive adoption only to slash all that when they reach critical mass. The relative lack of regulation and collective bargaining makes it very easy to do.

"couriers are paid fairly well" - Any references?

From what I've heard this is not the case. Actual data would be nice.

Two blog posts from Wolt about it, unfortunately in Finnish:

https://blog.wolt.com/fin/2019/11/01/27-kysymysta-ja-vastaus... https://blog.wolt.com/fin/2019/11/01/miten-ruokalahetilla-me...

Talking to couriers; Wolt being a Finland company with strong morals; operating only in EU. Check their website for estimated payment.

The gig market in Europe isn’t a slavery compared to US. Wolt also has higher delivery prices, which is how they can afford to do this.

Wolt is also big in Israel not only in the EU. Their reputation here is of being unfair towards both couriers and businesses. In both cases it's not about the base compensation it's about monopolistic over-controlling agreements like that restaurants are not allowed to do their own discounts and couriers get fined personally for being late (even if there was a valid reason)

For me, their time estimation has always been terrible and dishonest - they routinely estimate 25-35 minutes for places that almost always take 70min+, on really busy days for really common orders.

A comment from the CEO Miki Kuusi (translated from Swedish):

This financing was about to make sure that we have the capacity to do long-term investments i all our countries, including Sweden, without having to do an IPO (go to the stock market).

Source: https://digital.di.se/artikel/finska-wolt-tar-in-4-miljarder...

Cool, excited how the market will grow in Germany/Berlin. I really prefer Wolt over Lieferando in Germany. The user experience is way nicer, you have pictures of the meals which you want to order. The only thing which I miss is that you can't filter directly for vegan/vegetarian meals.

I really want to use Wolt in Berlin, but their delivery area just ends literally 50m north of where I live (Neukölln). Hope they extend it soon :-)

I think they extended it fairly recently, I also live in Neukölln and fell outside of the delivery area before Christmas at least. But I did a quick check after reading the article, and now everything seems to be working.

Wolt employee here - would be happy to help you with the Vegan/Vegetarian filter. We have a Vegan category of venues, and you can directly search for vegan/vegetarian restaurants as well. Is the issue in particular dishes?

I mostly struggle, when I have a specific restaurant open, some restaurants have an own category for that (vegan/vegetarian) and some add it as a text to the meal description. For some you have to choose e.g. a vegetarian patty to make a burger vegetarian - I'm confused with this mostly. A feature which i would really like is a list of all the meals which I can order nearby restaurant independent and filter them e.g. by vegetarian/vegan ones to discover new restaurants.

This is something we have been looking into - to be able to search not only nearby restaurants, but also nearby dishes matching the search criteria. I can’t promise an exact date of release, but definitely a highly requested feature. In the meantime I’ll see what we can do to clarify available vegan options more clearly before selecting an item.

Great, looking forward to it! Something like a food recommendation tool would also be nice. "Since you ordered A from B and C from D you probably also like meal E from restaurant F".

I would also like this feature :-)

Last time I tried, I had to search for "(V)" or "(VG)" in the menu search to filter the dishes, maybe there's a better way?

Got it. The issue isn’t then in finding restaurants with v/vg options, but instead finding those items in the menu? We haven’t standardized the tagging in menus too much in Germany yet, but this would definitely help. A separate category for v/vg would be another solution. Let me take a discussion on this with the team and see how this could be improved. Also happy to take any suggestions.

I walk to the restaurant and get the food myself. I refuse to take part in this gig economy with modern exploited day laborers, and big international companies dipping in to the already small margins of local businesses.

I sympathise with what you're saying. As a Nordic person, it does feel like the gig economy is undoing a hundred years worth of advancements in employee well-being.

Still, enabling day labor is beneficial in multitude of ways.

The problems introduced by gig economy need to be solved at governmental level. Social safety nets and UBI are good tools for that.

Combining modern regulation with sharing economy would allow the society to enjoy the multitude of benefits of gig economy without sacrificing anyones well-being.

I do the same.

It's odd when I walk or cycle past 20 Wolt people waiting outside the restaurants and takeaways on Nørrebrogade. I feel like the only person not attached to an insulated blue box.

Around here (Tel Aviv), Wolt is pretty much a monopoly on food deliveries, to the point restaurants pled for the government regulator to declare them as such.

Obviously it happens because their product and UX is fantastic.

Going around town during lock down seems like a scene from Mad Max where the only life that survived are Wolt couriers.

I do see orange couriers around as well, I think it's 10bis. But I only use Wolt. They have excellent customer service, in the rare occasion that an order I placed was delivered incorrectly (missing dish etc) they made it right very quickly and with no fuss.

They also provide support in both English and Hebrew, which is is a nice benefit over the local companies that can help you in Hebrew.

Yup, the orange ones are 10bis. (Wolt also works with Cibus which caters to the hitech companies, although still most use 10bis.) The annoying thing is that you get an allowance that if you don't use it, it just goes away, so if you live outside Tel Aviv area or just don't want to go out to eat this is not useful to you, the one good thing about 'rona is that they now just give the it directly into your salary.

In Oslo, Norway, I prefer Foodora to Wolt. Foodora's workers unionized and went on strike about a year ago in order to have sick leave. Meanwhile, Wolt hires their cyclists as independent consultants, circumventing the Norwegian labor laws.

Here in Denmark, Wolt started taking off recently, and these days you see Wolt couriers delivering food constantly. Over the last 10 years, I've several hundred orders on Just-Eat, but due to the improved UX of the Wolt app, I've now switched to it completely.

The UX might be good. But their business would not work if they stopped using young foreigners on tourist visas. Like Uber their business model works due to taking local laws lightly.

B..but they are "partners" /s

I am not really sure why people think the model is economic. The fixed costs are huge, it is either difficult or impossible to actually offset a living wage to the delivery person if they are only fulfilling one order at a time. The only way this model works now is by hosing down restaurants (in many places right now, there is literally no choice for restaurants but to make delivery apps money). It is true, lots of these restaurants got themselves into this mess by not realising how valuable deliveries were...but...I don't understand how this is long-term viable. Paying someone EUR10 to deliver EUR20 of food makes no sense for most customers.

Couriers definitely are not only fulfilling one order at a time. As you correctly surmise, that would not be possible to do economically.

Orders are routed so that couriers pick up multiple orders, and pickups and dropoffs can be interleaved to keep multiple orders live at all times.

Local laws are most definitely not taken lightly. Labour legislation in Finland, the initial market, is very strict.

Let's hope they come to London, then.

Just last night i was marvelling at how poor the Just Eat UX is - marking an order as delivered when it wasn't, i think purely via a timeout after the scheduled delivery time, then sending me an email asking me to review the meal after i'd cancelled it!

Me and my colleagues frequently discus how bad the UX of Wolt is, and how our favorite is the old-school hungry.dk.

Wolt is so slow and odd, and has a weird paradigm about adding copies of the same dish to the cart.

Some of the most basic things ("I want to see only pizza places that deliver to me") are not solved. What's the discovery tab even for?

I only like it (and suffer the UX) because it has live tracking of the orders. And because some restaurants are only available there.

I think people only prefer it because it looks more clean/modern, and not because it's easy to use.

Interesting that you seem to have the complete opposite experience of me. By the way, on my Discovery tab, I can scroll down a bit and click on Pizza to get a list of places that deliver pizza.

I wanted to check that out, and here's my experience.

1) Go to wolt.com. "Discovery" tab not visible. Probably have to scroll down.

2) Use web inspector to remove "noscroll" class from body. Now I can scroll.

3) Page shows general info about Wolt and how it works, but no restaurants. Fair, it probably needs my location. I'll log in so it knows where I am.

4) We had a special corporate account set up, so I can log in using a old-fashioned password. Usually people have to verify the login using the "passwordless" login thingie they have, every time they login.

5) Grey and glitchy screen with restaurant placeholders, and outline of a previous "delivery circle" notification. Spinning beachball kicks in, Safari tells me "This website is using significant energy".

6) Refresh the page and remove "noscroll" class again. Now I can click the Discover/Delivery tabs.

7) I see the Pizza section you mention in Discover. But right now all the restaurants are closed so I can't test if it does what I'm looking for. But I think the problem was that it didn't take into account which restaurants actually deliver to me right now. Or at least I don't get why I wouldn't always use the Delivery tab. I would just have designed it with one tab called "I want Food" I think :) (i.e. not two different tabs).

But generally I get a shit-ton of weird glitches and a "bloated JS app" feeling every time I order something there.

Parallel with amazon is interesting. Last mile in Europe is either non-existent or severely lacking. Wolt has successfully been bringin up this first. In that parallel, it can be considered a contender to amazon with a bottom-up approach. I've personally already seen it through wolt, with using their partners shops/storage. I was considering buying a bike for a toddler either through amazon (too long of a wait, but great choices), visiting shops locally (ain't nobody got time for that) or Wolt - we chose a model and within an hour (including assembly) toddler was already sprinting.

I've been using Wolt in Finland 3-4 times a week, their credit card integration with lunch benefits makes them a winner. They also have free deliveries sometimes.

Same here in Israel. They accept our lunch benefits card, which my employer got more generous with during WFH. So I spend about 100 usd each week with them. If I am not hungry I buy gift cards and add them to my account (the lunch money expires at the end of the week is I don't use it)

Ah this begins to make sense now

Tjey have a secret sauce for the finnish market.

So they funded ops via captive market

Still, Seems like a crazy bet by investors unless such schemes are available and exploitable elsewhere

Lunch benefits only launched recently.

I can't help but think that companies like this that are planning on the disruption in consumption habits due to Covid continuing into the subsequent years are going to get burned badly when everyone abruptly starts going out again. I think a lot of people have realized that dining and even going to the grocery store is a lot more about the social aspect than they originally believed.

sifted.eu lists Wolt as "Deeptech News". I find the word deeptech cringe. It's just tech.

It's barely tech, it's just a delivery company.

Loving Wolt. Btw, try tapping on the time estimate circle after placing an order. What's the highest score you ever got? :)

Interesting, good luck to them.

In my country at least (Croatia) Wolt seems to stand out from the rest by competing on quality of service and delivery instead of price, and slowly during this year they have won me over.

I'll gladly pay something extra to support a business model I trust and which just works better.

"But Wolt won’t be putting Amazon out of business just yet. It needs to crack grocery delivery first."

Ha! Son - fly little slow. You are standing on a thin crust provided by your investors. Have a quick call with Instacart to get a check on reality.

One thing to note about courier wages/payments. In Finland wolt started initally with more generous payments to the couriers and then gradually started to bring them down.

I couldn't find any information what differentiates them from any other similar service?

Better UX/UI afaik

Absolutely! And they have a truly excellent customer service and reply within minutes. If you have any problems with your order (be it related to the delivery time/estimate or the product itself), they are quick to compensate (usually with credits or a delivery voucher).

On the other hand, rumor has it, their commission is around 30 % of all sales in addition to the delivery charged directly from the customer.

The next uber? only time will tell

They went full Softbank.

Curious if any startup with this amount of early funding has actually done well

Wolt is not really a startup any longer, and it has never had access to really large amounts of money in the past.

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