Amsterdam-based Crisp, an app-only supermarket focused on ultra-fresh food, announced on Tuesday that it has raised €75M in a fresh round of funding from existing and new investors.
Half of the round came from existing long-term investors, including Target Global and Keen Venture Partners. New investors include a number of top Dutch entrepreneurs and executives, such as Adriaan Mol (founder of Mollie and co-founder of MessageBird), Sander van der Laan (former CEO at Action and Albert Heijn) and Joes Daemen (founder of Somerset Capital Partners).
Crisp, which claims to have doubled its customer base and number of orders in the past year, also announced the acquisition of local supplier Eetfabriek this month.
Acquires Eetfabriek
Eetfabriek is located in the middle of the industrial area of Vosdonk, the Netherlands. The company delivers sandwiches, drinks, smoothies, treats, and meals.
With this acquisition, Crisp says it will see its fresh assortment expand from 15 to 50 ready-to-eat dishes, mostly seasonal. Crisp has the view that the quality of the meal is defined by the quality of the ingredients as part of its objective to make great cuisine affordable for people.
Tom Peeters, CEO of Crisp, says, “We understand our customers’ taste buds. And we also know exactly where to find good quality, local and seasonal produce. Besides the daily groceries, we now have a completely in-house kitchen where professional chefs turn our fresh produce into flavourful dishes, without any detours and at affordable prices. Eetfabriek had long been a supplier to Crisp, and together we have now scaled this channel from number 21 to the top three largest local sources offered through our app.”
“The supermarket app for cracking fresh food”
Crisp was launched in November 2018 by Tom Peeters, Michiel Roodenburg and Eric Klaassen with an aim to make better food accessible for everyone. It claims to be the supermarket-app for fresh food.
The service distributes groceries throughout the Netherlands and Belgium seven days a week. Orders placed through the app before 10 PM get delivered the next day. Products from more than 800 local farmers and food providers are included in the assortment.
Crisp claims that it has had exponential growth since it entered the Belgian market in June 2021 – orders there have again increased recently. The company distributes using its own fleet of cars in both the Netherlands and Belgium, and it is fast converting to 100 per cent electric delivery. Its total product range has also grown 36 per cent in 2022, driven in part by the launch of the first range of non-food related items.
Peeters says, “The financial support gives us a lot of confidence and this is boosted even more by the increasing customer demand. We see the same trend that was recently identified in international research by McKinsey: even in a changing economic climate, fresh and conscious eating remains important, although keeping it accessible is becoming increasingly complex. We see that Crisp offers a solution to exactly that.”
“In a challenging market with global increases in commodity prices and energy costs, we see our model is at an advantage, as it gives us shorter distances due to a short supply chain and an energy-efficient infrastructure without offline stores. That is how we stay relevant to the customer and we see that reflected in demand,” he adds.
In June 2022, Crisp was awarded ‘Most Innovative’ e-commerce company by industry platform Emerce and was also named ‘Best Online Supermarket’ by research firm GfK (Formulerapport FMCG e-commerce 2022) in terms of offering, service, price, and quality.
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