You know that e-commerce is really beginning to take off in Africa when it starts being used for everyday things. There are about 2 million Nigerians who shop online using Konga and Jumia. But although there have been past attempts to launch online food shopping services none have broken through. Russell Southwood speaks to the latest contender Uchay Ariolu, founder, Foodstantly.

The idea for the service came to Ariolu (who had worked in the food industry) when he thought about food shopping in Lagos:”There are lots of issues Nigerians have in shopping for food. The markets are often dirty and it takes hours to get round them. Lots of professionals who work don’t have time.”

He also realized that lots of farmers have spare crops and it would make sense to bring buyers and sellers together. So he created a mobile platform for farmers, food traders and online shops. The payment side is done by integrating with Interswitch and there are also delivery arrangements once the order has been place.

“You just order from a farmer on our platform and he arranges things for you. Most of the people using the platform are either farmers or food traders”. So the person ordering says they want a certain amount of potatoes and the shipment has a delivery window for when it will arrive with the buyer.

“Most delivery partners cannot be relied on so we have to support them. The buyer pays for delivery.” This can vary between N400 for relatively short distances to N5,000 for much longer ones.

“We want to be able to offer users variety and in time we’ll offer free delivery on orders above a certain threshold and overall lower delivery rates.”

In addition to individual food buyers ordering uncooked food, it also offers take-away food orders similar to a site like Just Eat in Europe:”So if you want to order a pizza, you can order from Pizza House.” It’s early days but a thousand food outlets  have signed up to the platform and there are around 100 merchants offering fresh food.

Currently there are around 5,000 food buyers but Ariolu believes that the number of users will go up to 100,000 and that there will be 10,000 sellers. The current average order for fresh food is between N4-5,000 and on ready to eat food between N1,500-2,000. The business model works on charging sellers a 5% commission.

He’s also launched a food blog which gives users recipes and in turn he hopes to use these to sell local farm produce and will give advice to farmers on this.

There’s also a B2B element as restaurants can buy direct from farmers:”Big restaurants like KFC can buy from farmers.”

Thus far Ariolu has been “bootstrapping” the site but he’s looking for investors.

Food sites from elsewhere globally that might provide inspiration:

Dennis Collet, Orderella on the app that gets you fast service in bars and restaurants
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewzyFYDhZIw

Turkey's Gokhan Akan, Yemeksepeti.com on delivering all things food online
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg2HV3Xx1-M