Picnic wants to reach half of Germany’s population

Dutch online supermarket Picnic has launched in three additional German cities and aims to reach half the German population in the not too distant future. Local competition is rather weak, the company claims.

40 additional cities

Picnic is taking further steps into the large German market: after starting in Berlin in June, the Dutch online supermarket has just launched in Darmstadt, Mainz and Wiesbaden. In each of those cities, more than 3,000 families had pre-registered on the waiting list, Handelsblatt reports.

The residents will be delivered from the new, 20,000 sqm distribution centre in Viernheim: from here, the e-tailer plans to serve as many as forty additional cities in the south-west of the country. Currently, Picnic already serves some eighty German cities. The company started in North-Rhine-Westphalia and then moved to Hamburg and Berlin. Now Brandenburg, Flensburg, Frankfurt and Kiel are among the cities planned.

At a loss

“Our goal is to reach more than 50 % of the population in Germany by opening additional locations”, German CEO Frederic Knaudt explained. The app-only retailer has few local competitors: quick commerce companies like Gorillas are in difficulties and classic supermarket chains are struggling with e-commerce. Edeka has just sold its delivery service Bringmeister to Knuspr, the German subsidiary of fast-growing Czech group Rohlik, which already operates in some German cities.

This year, Picnic aims to turn over 400 million euros in Germany, but estimates losses to be around 67 million euros. Expansion should improve profitability, Knaudt says: last year there was a loss of 63 million on sales of just 275 million euros. A fortnight ago, Picnic director and co-founder Michiel Muller stated that those losses are part of the deal: the startup puts growth before profit and has sufficient financial resources. “We would rather step on the gas further than put on the brakes“, he said.