Delivery Service Glovo Opened Offline Stores in Madrid and Barcelona

Oscar Pierre, the 20-something founder of Spanish delivery startup sensation Glovo, talks dark kitchens after closing a 150 mln euro funding round.

– Six monthes ago, you’d just seen the first SuperGlovo. What’s happened since then?

– Delivery times have dropped quite a lot — now, on average, they’re 22 minutes. In Spain, online delivery for groceries has never been that fast. And we know we can go a lot lower; it all depends on capillarity. After a certain volume, [we know we need to] launch a new store.

The inspiration is a McDonald’s Drive Thro, where the picking time is so fast that when the courier gets there, to the window, they don’t need to wait.

We’ve built tech for the picker, they have a tablet, so they know more or less where things are. It takes them less time to pick the items than it takes the courier to get there.

We have around 1,000 SKUs — but we’re actually thinking about reducing it, more than growing it. Most of the orders go for the same products — quite boring things that people need urgently, like bread, milk, cereal, which they then top up with more random items. They also order a lot of drinks: we’re 24 hours and, depending on the area, we can deliver alcohol.

At some point, we’re going to get to a second stage where we think about going to big baskets. The long-term vision is eventually to become a retailer, with own-brand water, own-brand cereals.

– And what’s happening with dark kitchens?

– It’s running! As we grow, some of our [restaurant] partners are having issues with scaling — their kitchens are not growing as fast as us. Many are thinking of building their own dark kitchens, but some can’t afford to — they can rent the space [from us].

They bring everything they need to cook, and we offer them some shared services — we take care of drinks for them, freezers.

– Would Glovo move into making its own food?

– That’s a tricky one. In five years time, yes for sure. Not only Glovo, but other food delivery brands, with our knowledge and data, will be able to create our own food and cover the gaps in the city.

There’s a lot of growth for everyone .

– Would you work with the likes of Berlin-based dark restaurant startup Keatz?

– That for now I don’t know. It could be that we do both.

– It’s not always been easy for you to raise cash. How does it feel now that investors want to give it to you?

– We were looking for capital. We know all the categories we want to launch, and which countries, but we’re still far from saturating our growth channels.

We’re starting to get to a volume where profitability is very clear; if fundraising dries up we can take the company to profitability.

To be honest, we just closed the round, but next week I’ll start working on the next one.