Want a social side to your fast food? Spain's Glovo, a food delivery and quick commerce service where the majority of orders are ready-to-eat meals, adds a set of social features to further drive in-app activity We are conducting an experiment.
You can also spice up the user experience by allowing restaurant partners to upload food preparation videos and push a rich media feed to your users.
Glovo says new social features will allow users to find and connect with friends who use the same app. This is accomplished by matching the user's phone contacts with existing Glovo users and submitting a request for permission to connect. This allows users who opt in to share recommendations and discover restaurants their friends like.
Another new feature called “Picks” allows Glovo users to save and organize their favorite restaurants by creating and managing lists. These selections/lists can be kept private or shared with friends.
With its food video feature, the app recreates the vertical feeds popular on social media apps like TikTok, giving restaurants new marketing opportunities and allowing them to display something like a showreel on their menus.
Glovo itself doesn't produce cooking videos, but it does apply guidelines to posts from restaurants, which it says are aimed at ensuring high quality (there have been nearly 400 posts to date). ). “Content is strictly focused on the food offered and no other types of promotions are allowed,” the paper said.
The app update was previewed by Glovo at its new annual product event called Glovo Next, and will first be rolled out in its home base of Barcelona, before rolling out to other cities in Spain this month. If all goes as planned, the company says it will continue expanding its footprint to include the other 22 countries in which it operates.
Did your food decisions just get easier?
While the quick commerce category in general has experienced some ups and downs in recent years following something of a post-pandemic correction, Globo, owned by Germany's Delivery Hero, is confident that new updates will be of interest to consumers. In the delivery app, which denies that it corresponds to the decline of.
“Glovo shows excellent GMV [Gross Merchandise Volume] We achieved our growth trajectory (+44% FY22 vs. FY2024) and performed well in all countries,” Daniel Alonso, VP of Product at Glovo, told TechCrunch.
He also expects adjusted EBITDA to improve by approximately 10 percentage points compared to where the company was operating prior to Delivery Hero's acquisition in late 2021, reflecting continued growth in profitable markets. He said this was due to growth and the scaling up of “less mature markets.”
Alonso added that Globo is expected to reach positive adjusted EBITDA in the second half of this year.
The company also said its Quick Commerce division, which provides quick delivery of groceries, flowers, books, pet supplies, toiletries and electronics selected from stock in dark stores in city centres, is growing at more than 50% annually. spoke. – Throughout the year.
So if the growth of simple transactional apps is strong, why did the company decide to experiment by layering the stickiness of social media on top of it? The company said it is continuing to explore ways to help users make difficult decisions about which meal to order tonight.
The company said it expects this feature to increase discoverability of foods, including by leveraging friend-based recommendations. “We believe that by creating a social network within Glovo, we can help users make decisions like ordering food,” Alonso said. “We built an MVP to see if this is the case. Only time will tell if this is successful.”
“With so many options, it can be difficult to decide what to order,” he added. “Video Discovery Walls add a dynamic, visual element to food exploration, making the process easier and more engaging. These videos, created by local restaurants, allow users to discover how their food tastes. You can see how it will be cooked and what it will look like, so you can make more informed choices.”
Image credit: Glovo
Regarding permissions and privacy, Alonso asserted that “Glovo does not share or upload data without your explicit consent.”
He said that adding friends requires users to actively grant access to their contact list. Users must explicitly agree to connect with the requested user before information about their food delivery habits is shared with friends.
“To see which friends have given you a positive review or placed an order, you need to check if they are your Glovo friends,” he said, adding: I added as follows. “Shared data includes restaurants that the user's friends have ordered from in the last three months.”
Glovo users can revoke consent previously given to access their contacts and can remove friends from their social lists at any time after they've been added, Alonso said.
Additionally, Alonso confirmed that only contacts who are already Glovo users can receive an invitation to connect, so this is not some special (infamous) growth hacking trick.