In September, Bostonians were introduced to a new grocery delivery service, CartFresh, so that people can skip the visit to grocery stores.
What most Boston clients probably don’t know is that CartFresh is a sister company of Zakaz.ua, a Ukrainian grocery delivery service.
After five successful years of operation in Ukraine, Zakaz.ua started expansion abroad and entered the U.S. market in Boston.
Ever since 2010, when Ukrainian tech entrepreneur Yegor Anchishkin founded Zakaz.ua, technology has been his big advantage. Before Zakaz.ua, he launched Viewdle, a tech startup that developed facial recognition soft ware. Google bought it in 2012, paying at least $30 million. By that time, Anchishkin stepped out of Viewdle’s operations to work on Zakaz.ua.
Anna Matsyuk, CEO of Zakaz.ua, recalls that the company employed fi ve people when she joined it a few months aft er the launch in 2010. Today, there are 150 employees. The company’s turnover in 2014 was $3.5 million, according to Anchishkin. Although that’s almost the same turnover that Anchishkin revealed in 2013, he emphasizes that the company did grow in hryvnia.
In 2014, Zakaz.ua received $2.5 million investment from Chernovetskiy Investment Group, the fund of ex-mayor of Kyiv Leonid Chernovetskiy.
The service operates in Kyiv and Dnip r o p e t r o v s k and delivers groceries from three big supermarkets: Metro Cash & Carry, Novus and Fozzy, and a marketplace Stolychniy. Delivery is just Hr 39 for orders under 40 kilograms.
The company has a few smaller competitors, including a delivery service Ekipazh and in-house delivery services of supermarket Furshet. But Zakaz.ua has a trump card: photos of nearly all items it off ers.
Assuring that each of around 280,000 items in an online catalogue has a real photo was the biggest challenge Zakaz.ua faced. And they found the way – through technology.
The company designed a mobile photo studio that can take a 360-degrees photo of an item in just one minute. The invention looks like a plastic barrel with a rotating platform inside and a camera installed in it. To make a photo, the employees put a product on a rotating platform inside and wait for the camera to fi nish the shooting. Special soft ware needed to be developed to operate the camera.
The invention assured the company’s leadership in the market. While other grocery delivery services have only text description on items like fruits or meat, Zakaz has photos.
Technology is used on other stages, too.
Aft er a customer places an order, someone collects the ordered groceries from the supermarket shelves, consulting an app in his smartphone. When something is not right – for example, a producer changes the design of a milk package – the picker puts a comment in an app, and the new milk package gets rephotographed.
Today, Anchishkin lives in U.S. and is focused on CartFresh. While he admits that the American market is “hypercompetitive,” he believes that his startup has a chance against the giants like Amazon Fresh, Instacart and Google Express.
