Picnic wants to triple its turnover to €300 million in 2018. The online supermarket should also be profitable by 2020.
The shopping service realised a turnover of almost 100 million euros in 2017, three times as much as in the previous year. The number of households regularly ordering from Picnic rose to 90,000. The online service is currently not yet profitable. Thanks to a 100 million euro capital injection, however, Picnic can continue to expand.
Waiting lists
In Rotterdam, where the online supermarket delivers from February, 7,000 households are already on the waiting list. "You can't admit everyone immediately, because then things will go wrong," says Muller in the AD. "It's better to let customers know they have to wait a few weeks, so that we can then offer them perfect service: on-time and complete delivery. And once you're out of the queue once, you don't get back in. It has to be perfect from the start. If a customer gets super service from day one, they never leave.''
Ahead of classic supermarkets
The online supermarket says it has an edge over classic supermarkets thanks to the distribution model that has been worked on for years. Muller: "We are the only one that does it for free and on time. With traditional delivery models, delivery is very inefficient. We do six orders in an hour with our milk round. The others drive all day criss-crossing the city and people have to wait at home for hours.'' Muller does not expect supermarkets to copy this way of working. "In the software, logistics and network there is a lot of maths and thinking. A team of 30 specialists worked on this distribution method for three years. It is quite a hassle to make that. But everyone is welcome to take a look here. Many organisations also come over, we have no secrets.''
