App You Like It

The newly-established delivery app industry in Tanzania is serving up old business in a new format, diversifying the e-commerce market and driving consumer behavior beyond Covid-19.

- Inaara Gangji

When Zadok Prescott first started the home delivery application, Piki Tanzania, he only thought of it as a supplement to restaurant dining. However, when Tanzania also fell victim to the Covid-19 crisis in March, Piki, which was still new and the only established app of its kind in the country, soon became the only way some restaurants were doling out their services.

“I think a lot of people took that decision to stay at home and avoid contact. So, we suddenly realized how important we were becoming,” says Prescott, also former CEO of Jumia Tanzania.

At the end of November 2019, Jumia, Africa’s leading online retailer known as the ‘Amazon of Africa’, had shut its e-commerce operations in Tanzania in a review of its portfolio.

However, ironically, since the beginning of 2020, in the very market that Jumia exited, multiple e-commerce platforms suddenly sprung up, from food and grocery delivery apps to ‘online malls’ that sell commercial goods, besieging a market still relatively new to online shopping and dining.

With Covid-19, the role these platforms played in the lives of local businesses changed almost overnight.

For Levant, a fine dining restaurant offering Middle Eastern cuisine in upscale Dar es Salaam, delivery was not the path they wanted to take, but had to.

“When Covid-19 hit, our sales were 90% lower. Our plan was to give an experience, it’s not only the food you eat… [but] we realized people were afraid, so we had to focus on delivery… take-away was most of our sales,” says Hussein T Hamadi, the owner of Levant, which started delivering through Piki when the pandemic hit and even started its own delivery service.