![]() ![]() "Scott owned a few Spar franchises, so we created the app and did some small-scale promotion via Facebook targeting Dundee," Callachan explained. ![]() ![]() "This top-up shopping trend, it appealed to me, as I’d become a dad for the second time and I was always having to pick up bits on the way from home. Soon after that, business acquaintance Scott Campbell - then the owner of property solicitor The Chamber Practise - met with him and explained that he’d put convenience stores into several buildings he owned, but they weren't making much money, so he wanted to use the app to boost trade. "We built an app for them which allowed people to order food direct and put seven figures back on their bottom line, with the vast majority of their customers sticking with them - then we spun that out to white label it for others." One of his first major clients was the DRG Group, behind the likes of Di Maggio’s, Café Andaluz and Amarone. "But commission had gone up significantly and so many restaurants were complaining about not making any money on these platforms," Callachan states. This first venture came at the same time that JustEat was moving into the UK market and he admits that "they’d basically won" by the time his platform got going. His initial focus was on hot food, with the hungrrr app launching in 2017, offering offers the hospitality sector affordable web and app solutions to take online orders. A career of consultancy work wasn't going to cut it though, so eventually he decided to make his own. A brief historyĬallachan has been helping to build e-commerce sites since they first became a thing, working with the likes of JD Sports and Moneysupermarket to name a few. Launched in 2018, the Dundee-based company's model lets small grocery shops gain new customers, and better serve existing ones, by using its technology - and the retailer's own people - to deliver products direct from stores to their local area. Snappy Shopper is of course nowhere near the scale of Gorillas, or the likes of Deliveroo and UberEats for that matter, but Callachan says 2022 has been another record year, with retailers using the app consistently reporting up to 160% increased basket spend, compared to in-store. Snappy Shopper’s continued growth has been achieved on the back of last August's £19.4m Series A funding round, while he pointed out that German on-demand groceries app Gorillas - one of the largest dark store operators in Europe, and currently expanding into the UK - has raised more than £1bn investment, but reportedly burned through around £77m per month at the end of 2021. The Scottish scale-up recently completed its five millionth order after growing quickly during the pandemic, something Mike Callachan reckons is in stark contrast to the delivery giants, which appear to be pivoting as they look to curb spending and cut jobs. The chief executive of Snappy Shopper has warned that Scotland's local shops could be at risk of going out of business due to the threat of so-called 'dark stores' which fulfil orders for the major rapid-delivery platforms. ![]()
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