German supermarket group Edeka – which has an interest in Dutch web supermarket Picnic – is selling its delivery service Bringmeister to Czech investment group Rockaway. This may increase German online competition.
Focus on Picnic
Bringmeister came into the hands of Edeka after the acquisition of Kaiser’s Tengelmann in 2017. The delivery service operates in the regions around Berlin and Munich. According to the retailer, sales have tripled in the past three years, yet there was no investment in further expansion. Edeka, however, did take an interest in ‘pure player’ Picnic and now seems to want to concentrate on that, although the group will continue to deliver products to Bringmeister.
The buyer is the Czech investor Rockaway Capital, who owns e-commerce player Mall Group and online supermarket Kosik.cz in their own country. Rockaway wants to further develop Bringmeister’s activities on the German market in the coming years. This will put the company in competition with another Czech group that has German online ambitions: web supermarket Rohlik.cz, which will soon be launched in Munich. Founder Tomas Cupr wants to take his company to the Frankfurt stock exchange. “That’s why we want to become very well-known in Germany,” he told Handelsblatt.
It is therefore possible that the battle for online groceries on the German market will become a lot fiercer in the near future. After all, Amazon Fresh is also active there, while fast delivery services such as Gorillas and Flink are meanwhile expanding their activities and raising tens of millions of growth capital.
