Charis Chrisna
TechInAfrica — Botswana’s first and award winning mobile food ordering app, MyFoodness, continues to disrupt the industry – and has announced its partnership with SPAR G-West for grocery home deliveries.
MyFoodness is a mobile commerce food ordering app with cashless payment solutions built in. At the end of last year, MyFoodness was crowned the best tech startup in Botswana after winning two awards: Best Newcomer and Best Startup through Seedstars Global. Since then, they have enjoyed great media exposure across Africa’s most respectable media platforms for foreign investors in Africa, such as: Disrupt Africa, TechInAfrica, et al.
SPAR G-West is a grocery store owned by the Wentzel SPAR Group. Both teams of MyFoodness and the Wentzel SPAR Group are young, innovative and tech-savvy – and we are witnessing the real power of collaboration to fast track the Mobile Commerce industry in the country.
The partnership with SPAR G-West marks MyFoodness’ expansion into other product verticals, beyond food deliveries. In the last few months, the teams at both startups have been working hard to perfect grocery deliveries, including: technically syncing both platforms for reconciliation and order processing, doing tests and perfecting cold-chain deliveries for perishables, training staff on daily price updates, testing the curated product lines, and so much more. Consumers in Gaborone can now finally enjoy ordering groceries for delivery to their doorsteps, with a wide variety of product lines to choose from for their daily, weekly and monthly shop. The collaborators will roll out more stores shortly after this launch of the first store, which has been thoroughly tested over and over again during a period of four months.
“Our brand is focused on disrupting things in the innovation space and seeks to always find ways to introduce solutions that help people do things faster, easier and better. We are pleased for this partnership and to be expanding our services into grocery shopping. We have been doing exceptionally well with our food & drinks delivery and we hope to take off the same way with groceries. In fact, during our pilot phase with SPAR G-West, we already saw great traction and large basket sizes. We have had challenges with delivery times on our food & drinks vertical due to sudden scale, all of which we are improving daily. We know that Rome wasn’t built in a day. And so we are hyper focused on making the necessary improvements and listening to our customers. It’s all trial and error. That’s what innovation is all about” says MyFoodness Founder & CEO, Boi Kgathi Rasmussen.
For Spar G-West, the director Sean Wentzel says, ”We have worked with MyFoodness team on the food & drinks side through our other businesses. We have realized immense value in terms of our revenue growth and they are simply the best team to partner with. We were delighted recently when they developed a Robot which was a solution to the slow and often unreliable internet connectivity in the country. The Robot allows us to quickly receive all order details via a low bandwidth medium. Its instant and automated. Like us, they are young, energized and willing to try new things. With this partnership and through the use of their technology platform, we are saving our customers time and offering the convenience of ordering and paying directly from their smartphones.”
The launch of groceries deliveries is now official in Gaborone. First with SPAR G-West store and the rest of the stores owned by the Wentzel SPAR Group will follow shortly on MyFoodness app.
