One of the three African firms chosen to participate in Y Combinator’s summer 2023 class is ChowCentral, a company that specialises in meal delivery. This increases the stakes that Y Combinator has placed on the food delivery market in Africa.
ChowCentral, which has been described as “a Nigerian startup building restaurant chains for Africans who want high-quality meals,” has been accepted into the Summer class of 2023 at Y Combinator. Only three African firms were chosen to participate in this year’s cohort, and they include Eden Care from Rwanda and a startup from the Democratic Republic of the Congo that has not yet been named. Tosin Onafuye, Christopher Obasi, and Adeyemi Onafuye are credited with the establishment of ChowCental.
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The financial strength of ChowCentral
As part of the announcement, Y Combinator noted that the firm currently takes in over $80,000 in monthly revenue and cited ChowCentral’s “delicious recipes and faster deliveries” as part of its appeal. Y Combinator also shared that the startup was accepted into the programme. ChowCentral was formerly known as 500 Chow and was established in 2020 with the promise to provide meals with prices ranging from 500 to 800 yen (USD 500 to USD 800).
“Chow Central began as a fun experiment shortly after we graduated from university,” the company’s founders are quoted as saying on its website. During the time when Covid was down, we made a Twitter page in the form of a restaurant in order to sell reasonably priced meals and to assist restaurants that were not getting enough business.
ChowCentral runs a “central kitchen” in its current configuration and collaborates with “underutilised commercial kitchens” as fulfilment centres. ChowCentral is an online food delivery service that enables consumers to order meals from a variety of restaurants, pay with their in-app money, and check the status of their orders in real time.
The service can be found on its website. ChowCentral, along with other meal delivery services such as Jumia Meal, Bolt Eats, Glovo, and AreaChops, will soon enter an increasingly competitive market.
Previous records
In 2022, Y Combinator’s summer batch included only eight African startups out of thousands of applicants. Two of the eight firms were in the field of food delivery, despite the fact that financial companies accounted for the majority of the startups (six of the eight). Two delivery businesses located in Lagos, Chowdeck and FoodCourt, caught everyone off guard when they were accepted into the summer 2022 group. Both new businesses have experienced tremendous expansion over the course of the past year.
In July 2023, a reliable source informed us that Chowdeck will soon begin offering delivery services for groceries in Lagos. Chowdeck will now be in direct competition with Jumia on two of the most important fronts now that it offers grocery delivery.
Because of its investment in DoorDash in 2013, Y Combinator has strong reason to be positive on the meal delivery industry. Additionally, it has provided financial support to a great deal of other companies that focus on food delivery. Vendease, a Nigerian B2B firm that provides its services to eateries, was the winner in 2021.