INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Jow, the French e-grocery app — which combines recipes, recommendations and online grocery ordering — has raised $7 million in new
funding.The round is led by Stride.VC, alongside Caterina Fake and Jyri Engeström from Yes VC, and Shan-Lyn Ma, the co-founder and CEO of
Previous seed backers, DST global partners and eVentures also participated.Launched in 2018 and now supporting five of France’s leading
grocery retailers (Monoprix, Carrefour, Auchan, Chronodrive and E.Leclerc), Jow’s app claims to let you complete your weekly online food
shop in as little as a minute (once you’ve been on-boarded, of course).It does this by creating customised menus, tailored to each user
and household, and then automatically fills your online shopping cart with the required ingredients
The idea is to answer the question: “what’s for dinner tonight?” while providing a more cost-effective alternative to recipe kits such
as Blue Apron or HelloFresh, and less reliance on take-outs from the likes of Deliveroo or Uber Eats.“Doing your weekly shopping online
can take you up to one hour,” says Jow co-founder and CEO Jacques-Edouard Sabatier
“You waste a lot of time looking for the right product category, sub category, scrolling through hundreds of references, you finally find
your product, put it in your cart, and repeat this process up to 40 times (the number of items in your cart)! It’s a horrendous
experience, with no added value at all for the customer.”That’s in contrast to brick and mortar grocery shopping, argues Sabatier, where
there is an opportunity to “feel, taste and smell the products.” He says it’s the terrible user experience of grocery shopping online
that has limited its e-grocery growth
Jow aims to change that.“Jow creates a customised menu, just for you, with simple and delicious recipes,” explains Sabatier
“Our food recommendation engine considers your tastes, your kitchen appliances, whether or not you have children and checks the
availability of the ingredients in your supermarket
Jow then automatically fills your cart with all the ingredients you need to cook the meals.”In addition, Jow offers a customised list of
your repeat purchases, and its recommendation engine claims to help you choose the exact quantities needed to avoid waste
You also can check out with a single click, and the app will synchronise with your chosen supermarket delivery or pickup service.Noteworthy
is that the app’s recipe-to-cart feature represents on average 75% of the products Jow users add to their cart
Staple products such as toilet paper, beverages, toothpaste etc
make up the remaining 25%.The app is free for end users, seeing the Paris and New York-based startup generate affiliate revenue from
supermarkets that want to use the service to acquire younger, mobile-first customers
The business model is asset light, too, as Jow is largely built on top of the existing infrastructure and capabilities of larger
supermarkets.“Apart from the 50x improvement on the e-grocery funnel, it’s unbelievable to see that to date, in a world where you have
tailored and recommended experiences around music, video etc., you have no strong recommendation engine or experiences around food,” adds
Sabatier.In addition, the startup believes that more broadly it has created a mobile e-grocery experience that actually works
“E-grocery is one of the only e-commerce segments where desktop still prevails,” says Sabatier
“[Bucking this trend], 90% of Jow’s customers shop using their mobile devices, the experience is so smooth and fast that you can do your
weekly shopping in just one minute on the subway or the bus.”
