Delivery application Zulzi is advertising that it offers 15-minute grocery deliveries. MyBroadband conducted a test in Centurion, and it delivered our order in 28 minutes.
Although it didn’t deliver on its extremely ambitious 15-minute promise, the service was still fast and aggressively priced.
In fairness, the driver did struggle to find our office and called just after the 20-minute mark for directions.
Compared to other fast-moving consumer goods apps such as Pick n Pay asap!, Checkers Sixty60, and Spar2U, Zulzi was by far the cheapest in our area.
It also offered free delivery on our order, making it even cheaper.
MyBroadband will publish the full comparison in the coming days.
Zulzi is currently available in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pretoria, and Durban.
Zulzi might not be as well-known as apps like Asap!, Sixty60, and Mr D Food, but its history dates back to long before they launched.
Founded by Vutlharhi “Donald” Valoyi in 2013, Zulzi launched in 2016 — barely a month after Uber Eats in Johannesburg, and years before Checkers and Pick n Pay launched their on-demand delivery applications.
Valoyi launched the company with the plan to improve the speed at which online shopping packages are delivered.
In 2015, they started to deliver books and electronics to students within an hour. The market response was exceptional, and Zulzi’s user base grew rapidly.
Valoyi says he knew he was onto something big and that it was time to expand.
He brought in Michael Netshipise as chief technology officer, and soon Zulzi was offering to deliver “everything in your area within an hour”, including groceries, liquor, and medicine.
After reaching a turnover of R700,000 per month, Zulzi raised R1 million from IDF Capital.
Zulzi’s growth attracted the attention of major retailers, who wanted to partner to improve their online shopping experience.
Valoyi said that the appetite shown by Shoprite, which had no legacy systems at the time, was very appealing to them.
Zulzi developed the customer-facing Checkers Sixty60 app, the engine that controls the catalogue of all their products, and a dashboard to manage the orders, users, and store managers.
Checkers Sixty60 launched on 25 November 2019 and was a huge hit.
On the back of Sixty60’s success, Zulzi announced in 2020 that it raised R30 million from a JSE-listed company.
Empowerment Capital’s Mark Fitzjohn and Bongumusa Makhathini were added as non-executive directors of Zulzi OnDemand in May 2020.
IDF Capital no longer lists Zulzi as part of its portfolio, and Valoyi confirmed that they exited the business.
Valoyi said that Zulzi currently has over 100 employees and 300 independent drivers and pickers, and over 200,000 registered users on the platform.
They have processed more than 700,000 orders via the application — a 150% year-on-year growth.
He explained that they used to pick products from multiple retailers such as Woolworths, Pick n Pay, Clicks, and Dis-chem, but in 2021 they opened their first “dark store”.
Zulzi has seven dark stores in Johannesburg.
In 2021, Valoyi told MyBroadband they planned to revolutionise the South African ecommerce market further.
“We are planning to pioneer the quick ecommerce space in South Africa where you can get your products delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less,” he said.
“We want to take quick deliveries to the next level and simultaneously work on making it more affordable.”
Based on our recent test, Zulzi is well on its way towards its ambition and holding its own against much larger players in the space.
Words by Jan Vermeulen. Testing by Wikus Steyn.
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