It however noted that, although GoLemon might have competition in aspects of its product offerings, it does not have an “end-to-end competitor.”

The GoLemon team made this disclosure to journalist recently.

GoLemon is founded by four former senior managers at Paystack, who recently left the payment company to launch the startup.

As a startup that delivers groceries and household items. GoLemon, will be leaning on the six years sordid years of experience of;  Yinka Adewuyi, Gbadegbo Gbade-Oyelakin, Abdulrahman Jogbojogbo and Abiola Showemimo, who have previously worked for Paystack.

Forinstance, Adewuyi, a former product lead at Paystack, is now GoLemon’s CEO, while Gbade-Oyelakin, who led Paystack’s core platforms team, is the CTO.

Jogbojogbo, a marketing lead at Paystack, will lead the startup’s growth, and Showemimo, one of the first ten employees at Paystack, will lead operations.

The startup delivers groceries and household items to homes and businesses and will compete with other deep-pocketed companies like Glovo and Chowdeck, a YC-backed company. Competitors like Mano and Pricepally are also popular choices for grocery delivery in Lagos.

One its major strength of the startup will be managing its inventory and fulfillment centres, from a  built up sourcing network connected directly to farmers and manufacturers and optimises for the lowest costs possible to attract a wide customer base.

It is interesting to note that, GoLemon’s entry into the market comes months after international giants like Jumia and Bolt exited the food and grocery delivery segment last year.

Although, Francis Dufay, Jumia’s CEO, blamed challenging unit economics, big losses (Jumia Food never turned a profit in any of the 11 countries it operated in), and increasing competition for the decision to shut down Jumia Food.

And while some big players are beating a retreat, Jogbojogbo GoLemon growth manager, believes this is the best time to start a grocery delivery business.

According to him, “It’s difficult to get started right now and get traction but if we can weather the storm right now, I think we would have been able to build a formidable business,”

He added that would rely on Showemimo’s experience as a supermarket owner in Lagos and Gbade-Oyelakin’s experience as head of engineering at Supermart, an online supermarket, will be instrumental in building the  business, caters for  large orders and was “intentionally designed around people who make repeat orders, repeat purchases and large basket size orders,”

GoLemon was launched, weeks after a former Flutterwave vice-president launched Mira, a foodtech startup.

YC has also increasingly backed foodtech startups, even as it scales back its presence on the continent.

The obstacles that lie in the path of businesses intent on cracking e-commerce on the continent are well-documented, among which infrastructural deficiencies, logistical hiccups, skepticism for online shopping and predilection for offline retail, slow adoption of digital payment, among others, figure prominently.

Nevertheless, Africa is widely regarded by experts as the next frontier for bullish e-commerce growth.

Compelling insights from recent research by the International Trade Administration (ITA) shows that Africa represents a smart gamble for interested investors looking to reap the benefits of the wave of growth in e-commerce on the continent.

Titled – The Rise of eCommerce in Africa – the study bets on the exponential boost in mobile technology that is expected to jumpstart e-commerce from its current middling status to a multi-trillion-dollar industry in the coming years.

“The logic of growth on this area is pretty much based on technology jumps that do occur within Africa because of historically missing economic infrastructure, such as banks, telecom landlines, etc. Africa is forecast to surpass half a billion ecommerce users by 2025, which will have shown a steady 17% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of online consumers for the market,’’ the study boldly asserts.

Specifically, the research shows that Africa currently leads the world in mobile device web traffic generation, with 69% of its total web traffic consisting of mobile internet users as of 2021. Further, the continent is forecast to be almost exclusively mobile-based market by 2040.

Continuing, the study notes that:

‘‘Compared to other regions, as of 2021 the African continent leads mobile internet usage a full 13% above the global average, and almost 5% more mobile usage than Asian region markets. This should indicate a “mobile-first” approach to any business looking to sell online to the various African markets.’’

The foregoing is backed up by a 2017 Accenture Digital Consumer Survey which discovered that in countries such as South Africa, smartphone acquisition increased from 52% in 2016 and 63% in 2017. Some of the more technologically advanced nations like Kenya and Nigeria boast a smartphone uptake of more than 44% and 30% respectively.

Across the continent, the number of smartphone users saw a nearly two-fold increase, reaching more than 226 million.

This spike in smartphone penetration, the survey submits, is steering a digital revolution on the continent, exposing users to the endless opportunities the internet provides, top of which is e-commerce.

Considering these lofty assumptions, it therefore came as a huge shock when Jumia, a multinational African-focused ecommerce company disclosed that it will shut down Jumia Food, its food delivery business in Nigeria, Kenya, Morocco, Ivory Coast, Tunisia, Uganda, and Algeria by the end of 2023 in a new round of cost-cutting.

Jumia CEO, Francis Dufay told Reuters that the food delivery segment has challenging unit economics and big losses, while also attributing the closure of Jumia Food to increasing competition and unsustainable cost of operations.

“There is downward pressure on the commissions that we make and upward pressure on marketing costs because everyone is fighting for customers,’’ Dufay had stated.

The Jumia Food debacle represents another signpost in a seeming never-ending list of missteps and abrupt exits by the management of Jumia since it set up shop in Africa.

This includes the offloading of Jumia Travel, its hotel and flight services vertical in 2019 to a rival brand, Travelstart – a move which came a few weeks after the shutdown of its eCommerce businesses in Tanzania and Cameroon and laying off staff in Kenya.

Founded as Jovago in 2013, the hotels and flights marketplace became Jumia Travel after it rebranded in 2016. Earlier in 2017, the company had sold off Jumia House, its real estate subsidiary to ToLet.com.ng, a property startup, after it failed to scale.

To start with, Jumia is a German-headquartered e-commerce platform, with its technology and product team based in Porto, Portugal, and until recently, its senior leadership operated out of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Yet, it lays ambitious claims to becoming the African Amazon – a faulty dynamic worsened by a damaging identity crisis and the importation of business principles and strategies fit for the Western world and which the management expected to succeed in Africa, a developing continent with its myriad of teething challenges.

Indeed, several critics regard Jumia as an exploitative Western company that conveniently co-opted an African identity to extract as much value as possible and profit off the continent.

As one of the founding employees of Jumia, I had expressed reservations at the ease with which the early-stage founders of the company had been eased out of the business. Every business has its DNA which symbolizes the very essence, cornerstone or soul of the establishment.

This ideal is often reposed with the visionaries of the business and consolidated over time as the business scales. In the case of Jumia, what we had was a wannabe e-commerce behemoth with a major identity crisis. This foundational ambiguity would prove to be one of the catalysts that hurt the business in the long run.

At the height of the Jumia-Konga battle for the dominance of the Nigerian e-commerce sector when both brands launched in 2012, one thing was discernible: Jumia was often quick to arrogantly ridicule or thumb its nose at any innovation or strategy pioneered by a rival brand, even if it was a masterstroke, although the lessons of history showed that it may eventually ape the strategy when it realizes there is a market advantage therein.

Those early days of e-commerce, particularly in Nigeria where I was based at the time, was one full of hype and little substance as both giants embarked on a battle of attrition for the leadership position in Africa’s biggest market.

It took the coming of Yudala which was founded by a fresh-faced varsity graduate and backed by Nigeria’s biggest technology group to make both rival brands sit up and become more intentional about the substance of their hyped-up efforts (more on this later).

In early 2014, Konga pioneered the marketplace structure that is now a major staple of e-commerce on the continent. In its usual fashion, the management of Jumia derided it as a DOA (dead on arrival) strategy. However, it soon ate its words after advice from some of us in the business who saw how Konga was already stealing a march on us. Five months later, specifically in July 2014, Jumia followed suit with its own marketplace.

Then came the entry of Yudala – a landmark development that shook up the e-commerce market in Nigeria.

Led by Prince Nnamdi Ekeh who was 22 at the time and just fresh out of school, Yudala pioneered the composite e-commerce model with the fusion of online and offline – a futuristic piece of innovation that has now been adopted by other global players. Yudala’s emergence was a refreshing relief to the chokehold of Jumia and Konga.

The brand, though big on hype as its older rivals, matched its words with true substance.

In addition to rolling out eye-catching fuchsia-pink retail stores across major cities in Nigeria, Yudala took on big projects which expanded the scope of the industry.

One of these remarkable milestones was the first ever drone delivery in the e-commerce world – a feat which was achieved in 2015 and which predated any other similar efforts.

When in 2018, the management of Zinox, the technology conglomerate backing Yudala, acquired Konga from its previous owners, Naspers and AB Kinnevik, it was obvious to all interested parties that this was a development worth keeping an eye on.

In my own capacity, I had also advised the management of Jumia, especially considering the renowned capacity and decades of experience and success at the disposal of the new owners of Konga, to keep tabs on their strategy and follow suit or even explore partnerships, if that would guarantee a path to profitability.

The dust had barely settled on the monumental news of the acquisition when the management of Zinox announced an operational merger between Yudala and Konga. Although I had departed Nigeria, I followed with keen interest how the new owners subsequently rebranded the new entity that emerged from this operational merger, slowly transforming it into a dominant e-commerce force.

It is important here to state that while Jumia decided to double down on its poorly conceived pan-African expansion and an ill-advised IPO founded on shady figures and cooked books, Konga chose to continue consolidating its growing dominance in Nigeria:

• KongaPay was repositioned and recalibrated, leading to its rating by Statista in 2021 as the leading provider of digital payment services for e-commerce transactions in Nigeria.
• In 2019, the brand added Konga Travel to its list of growing subsidiaries. A technology-driven, revolutionary online travel booking agency, the new entrant gained prominence and market relevance within a short period of time.
• From Kxpress, the management of Konga relaunched its delivery arm to Konga Logistics, expanding its fleet of vehicular assets and by extension, its capacity to not only handle Konga’s last mile deliveries but also cater to external customers.
• Konga Health, a digital health care distribution subsidiary joined the fray in June 2021. Today, the brand boasts exclusive distribution agreements with global brands such as L’Oreal and Livful, among others.
• Konga embarked on an expansion of its retail outlets and the set-up of massive warehousing facilities in regions across Nigeria, including what is arguably the biggest warehousing structure in Lagos located at Lekki

Amid all these major strides by its major rival, Jumia endured an embarrassing exposure of its IPO as a worthless sham by the popular US-based short-seller Citron, with its share price, which once traded as high as $60, now going for less than $4 today.

The stubborn insistence of management in not borrowing a leaf from the Konga copybook has also seen Jumia continuously lose ground in Nigeria and in other less buoyant African markets.

The current exit of Jumia Food leaves a sour taste in the mouth, particularly for those of us who number among ex-employees of this once-grand e-commerce pioneer. In addition to remaining unprofitable over the years, Jumia is still shipping huge losses, as high as $19 million in Q3 2023.

With its share price tumbling down by the day and investors now potentially hedging their bets on the brand, how much longer can Jumia keep its head floating above murky waters in Nigeria before calling it a day for its remaining core physical goods delivery segment and struggling payment service, Jumia Pay?

The jury is out on that.

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The company’s current priorities across its 11 operational nations are the Jumia Pay platform and its core physical goods business.

Even though JumiaFood accounted for 11% of Jumia’s Gross Merchandise Value in the first nine months of 2023, the company has had difficulty turning a profit since its founding.

This indicates that between January and September of 2023, the total value of food sold on JumiaFood was $64 million, or 11% of $581 million. a measure of the enormous size at which Jumia Food was functioning, but it is not a measure of profits.

Jumia Food has had mixed results since its beginning, but in 2021 it showed a noteworthy 82% year-over-year growth, indicating the company’s solid position in the meal delivery market.

Nonetheless, the business witnessed a significant drop in Quarterly Active Customers and Orders in 2023. a result of its change to concentrate on profitable areas and lower customer incentives to increase profitability.

Regarding the staff, the company says many of them will move to the main physical goods division, implying that some may face layoffs.

Both Jumia Food and Glovo have established a strong presence in the food delivery market in Lagos, Nigeria. They cover a wide range of areas, making it convenient for customers to access their services. 

In terms of market reach, user experience, restaurant partnerships, and growth strategies, both platforms have their strengths and strategies which determine who holds the upper hand in this high-stakes food delivery landscape.

Market Reach

Jumia Food and Glovo, both giants in their own right, have strategically planted flags across Lagos, Nigeria, creating an ecosystem of culinary convenience. While both platforms have succeeded in making their services accessible, Jumia Food inches ahead with a broader coverage area. Its presence in around 500 neighborhoods grants the platform an undeniable advantage in terms of potential customer reach. Glovo, although not far behind, operates in 300 neighborhoods, solidly penetrating, but a step behind in this particular aspect.

User Experience

Simplicity and efficiency have become the yardsticks by which food delivery platforms are measured. Jumia Foods and Glovo have risen to this challenge by offering user-friendly interfaces that transform ordering into a streamlined experience. 

Jumia Food’s streamlined and efficient ordering process, reflected by over 4 million downloads, bolsters its claim to a smoother user experience. On the other end, Glovo’s approximately 2.5 million downloads suggest a strong but slightly smaller user base, possibly pointing to a marginally less established user experience.

Restaurant Partnerships

The alliance with restaurants constitutes an essential battleground for food delivery platforms. Here, Jumia Food shines brighter, boasting connections with over 4,000 restaurants, including prestigious chains such as KFC and Domino’s Pizza. 

Glovo’s collaborative endeavors, with partnerships extending to around 1500 restaurants, are commendable, with top chains including KFC, Domino’s Pizza, Burger King, Chicken Republic and The Place, among others. Yet they find themselves trailing behind in terms of both variety and quality of options. The diverse tapestry of Jumia Food’s affiliations caters to an extensive array of culinary cravings.

Growth Strategies

The strategic symphony of growth and innovation reverberates from both Jumia Food and Glovo. Jumia Food’s crescendo is marked by its bold expansion endeavors into new territories, coupled with an impressive 120%+ increase in orders over the past year. The introduction of features such as Jumia Prime solidifies their lead in the race. Meanwhile, Glovo keeps pace, reporting a commendable 180% growth between 2021 to 2022. By August this year, the company registered over 590% Year-on-Year. Their parallel pursuit of aggressive growth strategies emphasizes the intensity of the food delivery innovation.

The Verdict

Between Jumia Food and Glovo, the former currently holds a slight edge across multiple fronts. Yet, it’s important to acknowledge that the food delivery landscape is ceaselessly evolving, with innovation and competition pushing platforms to ascend new peaks of excellence.

As they continue to refine their services, both Jumia Food and Glovo have their unique strengths, catering to diverse customer preferences. The crown of dominance in the food delivery realm remains a subjective matter, contingent upon individual tastes and the experience that resonates most profoundly.

In the ongoing food delivery landscape, Jumia Food and Glovo embody not just two contenders, but the embodiment of a dynamic and ever-changing market. Their strategies, strengths, and innovations redefine the landscape, perpetually raising the bar for each other and all future aspirants.

Jumia Food Nigeria has announced the launch of its Online Food Festival campaign. The event will take place from March 13th – 26th, 2023, featuring special discounts, combo deals, and more from participating restaurants.

The two-week long festival will feature exclusive deals from top-rated restaurants such as Cold Stone Creamery, Pinkberry, Samantha Bistro & co, Yin Yang Express, Tantalizers, Bukka Hut, Dodo Pizza, Domino Pizza, Cilantro, and more. Consumers will be able to enjoy their favourite meals from these restaurants at discounted prices and with the added convenience of fast delivery.

“We are excited to bring this Online Food Festival to our consumers in Nigeria. At Jumia Food, we are always looking for ways to enhance the consumer experience and provide exceptional value. The Online Food Festival is a testament to that, and we are confident that our consumers will enjoy the various discounts and deals on offer,” said Oluwafemi Ajulo, Head of Commercial, On-Demand Services, Jumia Nigeria.

Online food delivery in Nigeria has seen a remarkable growth over the past few years, with many consumers preferring to order food online for its convenience and safety.

According to a report by iMarc Group, the online food delivery market in Nigeria is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.2% during the period 2023-2028, driven by factors such as rising smartphone adoption, elevating levels of urbanisation and increasing internet penetration.

This is a clear indication of the growing popularity of online food delivery in Nigeria.

Consumers can download the Jumia Food app to access the Food Festival deals and discounts. With a growing number of restaurants and cuisines to choose from, Jumia Food Nigeria is committed to delivering an exceptional food ordering experience for consumers across Nigeria.