Wolt Luxembourg is winning over locals, having grown from 150 to 700 partners in just over a year and recently announcing a partnership with local online grocery service, Luxcaddy.
As Wolt Luxembourg general manager Tomás Etcheverry can attest, one of the main challenges for the company when it launched locally in February 2024 was that it “entered into a market that had one strong player and had been there with some exclusive contracts, even during covid, when restaurants were closed, and I think they haven’t forgotten that.”
Being a new player at the time meant “breaking through those established relationships,” he adds. But he believed in the scale of the “super-developed” platform which allowed for a subscription model, discounts and promotions, merchant ads and more.
The platform offers a balance between local and world-class products and now counts around 700 restaurants and shops (compared to around 150 at the time of launch). According to a Wolt Luxembourg spokesperson, the most popular meals have been hamburgers (over 260,000 have been delivered since the app’s launch).
Since May, Wolt Luxembourg has partnered with local online supermarket LuxCaddy, offering customers more than 5,000 grocery products at their fingertips which can be delivered to their homes in less than an hour.
“Luxcaddy brings the selection and quality of a trusted local grocer, and Wolt brings the speed and convenience of (almost) instant delivery,” Etcheverry said. “It’s a perfect match.”
Finding the right balance
Wolt, a tech company based in Helsinki, was founded in 2014. In 2022 it joined forces with DoorDash, which operates in 32 countries, most under the Wolt brand.
Etcheverry, who arrived in Luxembourg from Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2019 to work for Amazon on international expansion projects, says that engagement has been key to Wolt’s success. “All the engagement we do with the local community sets us apart from other players in Luxembourg. I think that’s something we as a company do well,” he says. “When we go somewhere, we try to really land in the country and be as local as possible.”
But it’s also about striking the right balance, he notes. For every delivery, customers don’t want to overpay, but restaurants and couriers also need to be satisfied. “We need to build a sustainable business, so the art is to always be monitoring and tweaking the balance. We’re always monitoring and tweaking this art, having all three components of this ecosystem happy at the same time.”
Plans for the future
Etcheverry hopes the partnership with LuxCaddy will evolve into more grocery outlets available on the platform in future. “Our platform is ready for them, and we want to make it happen,” he says. “It brings a lot of convenience for the customers… and then we could provide couriers more earning opportunities [outside of peak hours].”
He adds that in some locations, there are also options to purchase things like phones and clothing—all of which could be possible one day for Wolt Luxembourg—and there’s energy from the team to push forward. “We started with the food court, but now we’re building the other floors.”
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