Interview: How grocery delivery firm Weezy plans to take localism national

One could argue that Weezy’s co-founders, chief executive Kristof Van Beveren and chief operating officer Alec Dent, couldn’t have picked a better time to launch an on-demand grocery delivery app than the beginning of 2020.

Since the business launched that January, grocery ecommerce penetration has doubled to around 16% of total sales due to the pandemic. 

However, neither Oxford-educated Dent nor Dutch-born qualified aerospace engineer Van Beveren had any prior experience working in grocery when the two first discussed Weezy in mid-2019. They just wanted to answer a simple question. 

“When we met and first started talking about what would become Weezy, Kristof was doing a lot of freelance consultancy work,” says Dent.

“We asked each other why he could get a fully cooked meal sent to his home in 30 minutes, but not fresh groceries. 

“We just wanted to solve what seemed like a really basic problem” 

Alec Dent, Weezy 

“So, basically, Kristof either had to walk a long way to his local grocer every day or spend lots of money on takeaway. We just wanted to solve what seemed like a really basic problem.” 

The business opened its first fulfilment centre in London’s affluent Chelsea and Fulham borough at the beginning of 2020, with the idea of focusing on “time-poor professionals and parents”. 

Since then Weezy has expanded to other boroughs across London’s centre, southwest and east and has seen its customer base change, according to Van Beveren. 

“Some of our customers don’t have time to go to the supermarket because they are on Zoom calls all day. Others because they have young children running around or the schools are closed and they can’t leave them,” he says.

“So the reasons for our customers being time-poor may have changed, but they are still time-poor. There’s still a need case; it’s just different.”

How Weezy works is relatively simple. Customers sign up and shop through the app and orders are then packed and delivered to the customer’s home, all within 15 minutes. Deliveries are made from 10am to 10pm every day and cost a flat £2.95 delivery fee.  

The 15-minute window makes Weezy one of the fastest on-demand grocery services on the market, quicker than both Sainsbury’s Chop Chop and Ocado’s Zoom, which promise to fulfil orders within one hour. 

However, new players have entered this growing market since Weezy launched. Since the first lockdown in March, a number of takeaway delivery apps, such as Deliveroo and Uber Eats, have partnered with grocers to provide top-up convenience shopping within half an hour. 

But Weezy’s Dent and Van Beveren say their service effectively cuts out the middleman involved in those transactions, which means their service is more competitively priced and offers quicker fulfilment than rivals such as Deliveroo. 

Being a tech start-up with this unique selling point has clearly resonated with investors. Weezy has secured more than £15m in funding since last summer, from venture-capital firms and individual backers alike, including former executives from Ocado, Tesco and Sainsbury’s. 

Despite being an on-demand app, Weezy’s back-end fulfilment is decidedly analogue. It doesn’t use automation or other tech wizardry to deliver in 15 minutes, but a network of fulfilment centres where riders pick and pack orders themselves. 

As Dent explains, what started out as a cost-saving strategy has actually helped Weezy find its unique selling point. 

“We started out with a hyperlocal focus because, frankly, it was cheaper for us. But actually it ended up helping with everything.

“When we started, we formed really good relationships with the local councils. We always wanted to use electric scooters and bicycles to make the deliveries, because we didn’t want to cause any noise or air pollution. So we’ve always had a really local mindset.”

“Every delivery we make, we’re thinking about it as if we were delivering it to our mother-in-law”

Kristof Van Beveren

At a time when many high street businesses have been struggling with coronavirus closures and, post-Brexit, many grocers have looked to move supply chains closer to home, Weezy’s hyperlocal focus has also proven beneficial in finding wholesale customers. 

Unlike other services, the business doesn’t just work with wholesalers, but also partners with local bakeries, butchers and markets, which Van Beveren says helps to provide customers with quality ingredients while knitting the business further into the communities it operates in. 

“The closest analogy I can think of is that every delivery we make, we’re thinking about it as if we were delivering it to our mother-in-law,” he says.

“We want every delivery to have extreme customer service and those are the things that really local shops are doing very well.” 

The business has grand plans to expand its service, with 40 new fulfilment centres in 20 UK cities by the end of 2021. 

However, as the business begins to rapidly expand, will it be able to keep its local credentials? 

“Is it possible? Yes, but it requires choices,” says Van Beveren.

“You start local because you’re small. But, as we’ve grown, the question is: do we want to pull everything to the centre and make things more efficient but more corporate? Or do we want to be a bit more decentralised and give people more ownership locally, and focus a little bit more on the customer? 

“It’s a choice between the two, really. But, for us, that localism has always been a critical part because we have an extreme customer obsession, an extreme customer focus.”

While the two may be standing on the cusp of a major breakthrough for their business, neither have lost sight of why they began Weezy in the first place. 

“Before the pandemic, people could order on-demand restaurant food before they could groceries,” says Dent. “Which meant that those looking for on-demand convenience could only eat a certain type of food, which was more expensive and often not as healthy. 

“By providing equivalent, if not better, convenience groceries, alongside providing high-quality products, you make it much easier for people to eat more healthily and more affordably, which is key in what we’re doing.”

With its focus on localism, sustainability and, above all, speed, Weezy has tapped into a number of pandemic-driven consumer trends. Dent and Van Beveren are banking on the fact that the model won’t run out of steam, even after pandemic restrictions begin to lift.