In South Africa, Delivast, a new grocery delivery startup has launched. The platform allows consumers to order goods from multiple stores and have them delivered to their location. Delivast has partnered with supermarket chains Pick n Pay and Woolworths, and pharmacy chain Clicks.
Delivast currently operates in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth. It has its own pickers who fill the basket in-store and drivers who deliver the goods to customers and markets its service as delivery within two hours of ordering. It positions itself to retailers as an additional distribution and revenue channel.
The online channel in South Africa has accelerated rapidly in the past twelve months, in part due to high growth (Massmart’s internal forecasts predict the online market doubling between 2018 and 2023), service innovation by Shoprite and Pick n Pay, and the demands of lockdown.
In November 2019, Shoprite’s Checkers launched Sixty60, an app-based service that promised to get groceries delivered to you in 60 minutes. The service was initially rolled out in certain areas of the Western Cape and Gauteng. It has proven to be a gamechanger for online grocery retail in South Africa among South Africa’s more affluent consumers, and its growth boosted considerably by the COVID-19 lockdown.
In March 2020, Pick n Pay, the first major grocery chain to offer an online delivery service, launched an online scheduled grocery delivery service. That service, called Grocery Genius, enables customers to set up an automatic weekly or monthly delivery of products they buy regularly.
Delivast is not actually yet operational. Its planned launch is at the end of July. It is still hiring staff and there is little concrete detail about how it operates.
