Rohlik growing fast in online grocery white spots

Czech based online grocery pure player Rohlik has been one of the fastest growing online grocers over the recent years. Rollick has been utilising two kinds of white spots in the online grocery market to enable its growth.

First of the white spots refers to the country’s of operation and the second to the value proposition of the company.

Expansion in the Central Europe

Since its founding in 2014, Rohlik has expanded from the Czech Republic to cover Central European countries. The most recent being the big markets of Germany (brand name Knuspr) and via an acquisition of Sesame to Spain and Italy.

Why is the geographical expansion of Rohlik a white spot?

Rohlik has been expanding in markets, which have traditionally been regarded as less developed online grocery markets. This makes it harder to expand as big portion of the customer base has never even tried online grocery, let alone have a habit of ordering food online.

On the other hand, the competition is also less intense compared to more mature markets like France, Netherlands or UK.

If Rohlik is able to teach customers new habits, the growth potential will be massive. Especially the German, Spanish and Italian markets will provide growth opportunities long into the future.

Combining aspects from quick commerce and traditional online grocery

Source: Rohlik.cz

The differentiate in the market, Rohlik combines elements from the rapidly growing quick commerce segment with some core elements from the traditional online grocery players.

In stead of offering delivery in 10 or 15 minutes, Rohlik is providing great convenience for the customers by delivering the orders in up to 90 minutes from the order.

This a great value proposition, but at the same time the company can batch more than one delivery into the van at a time. This enables much more efficient deliveries compared to the quick commerce players. However, it is also much more convenient than the next day delivery fo the traditional online grocery retailing.

In terms of the assortment Rohlik carries, the company associates much closer to the traditional grocery retailers. Rohlik states that it carries around 12 000 products in its assortment. This is naturally much less than a conventional hypermarket with tens of thousands of products. But it is also much more than the convenience focused quick commerce players with 1 000 to 2 000 products.

With 12 000 products Rohlik can easily cater for all the weekly grocery needs of the customer.