Jumia Goes Fresh, Gets Its Own Whole Foods (Yes, So Fresh) Through Partnership

Jumia is firing on all cylinders these days. There is a new level of intensity that comes when you are a public company. If Amazon did it – yes, getting Whole Foods, a grocery chain in-house – we will explore our options. An option is here: Jumia is partnering with So Fresh, a Nigeria-based fresh food chain, to deepen its competitiveness in the restaurants service nexus.

Jumia Food Nigeria has added So Fresh, Nigeria’s leading fresh food chain, to its ever-growing catalogue of restaurants on its platform. This is in a bid to promote healthy living among Nigerians.

Guy Futi, the Managing Director of Jumia Food said the company’s commitment to promoting and encouraging a healthy lifestyle among Nigerians necessitated the partnership.

“As a business, we are always looking for new ways to serve our customers, such as through a partnership like this. I am particularly excited with So Fresh because this is an opportunity for us to support and sustain healthy lifestyle among Nigerians through the consumption of fresh foods which customers can now order from So Fresh on Jumia Food. 

If you look carefully, Jumia is using its brand equity and visibility to become an aggregator. That is a winning model any day. So Fresh is in, and the journey to flip Africa from atoms to bytes in commerce continues!

In the aggregation-integration construct, more values accrue to the entity that controls demand, not supply, since supply is largely unbounded and unconstrained. For example, the number of news sources (i.e. the suppliers) is large while the entities that host users and control their experiences like Twitter, Facebook, and Google (i.e. the aggregators) are limited. These aggregators accumulate most gains and also hold more power over the suppliers of news like newspapers.

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