July the 20th, 2021 - Croatia's grocery delivery services have experienced a huge increase ever since the pandemic struck and people were in self-isolation with restaurants and the like closed. In fact, grocery delivery services in Croatia are about to become even better, with the country among nine EU nations in which extra fast delivery will soon be made readily available.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Sergej Novosel Vuckovic writes, the Republic of Croatia will be one of the nine EU markets (along with Portugal, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Sweden) where groceries can be ordered through the Bolt Market service. This is a new feature of the Bolt Food application, the Estonian mobility platform Bolt, one of the European leaders in the urban transport segment (includes on-demand driving and delivery).

The Bolt Market service was successfully presented as a pilot project in its home country of Estonia, and will be available in these countries by the end of the year. The feature of the service is the connectivity of grocery delivery with ''dark stores'', places for the fast pick-up of goods, and customers, in order to have the order delivered to them as quickly as possible, within just fifteen minutes, according to Bolt.

"The synergy of food and grocery delivery services will enable Bolt to manage its business more efficiently and provide better customer service," explains Bolt, which will create new teams of employees from five different positions due to the new service.

The appearance of Bolt Market in Croatia is good news for local users, because Bolt Food has only existed in Zagreb and Split since May 2020. However, it has since established itself as one of the favourite food and grocery delivery services.

"Given that the service was presented in Croatia a little over a year ago, we can be satisfied with the results so far. In the first six months of this year, we achieved growth of 97%, and in June this year we closed with 34 times more orders compared to June 2020,'' says Tomislav Lukacevic, the director of Bolt in Croatia. Due to the growing number of deliveries, they're in constant search of new suppliers.

As for Bolt's share in the on-demand driving segment in Croatia, several thousand active drivers are hired per month, but they will also need more owing to increased demand for such food and grocery delivery services.

Dmitri Liberman, vice president of the business delivery vertical at Bolt, is also satisfied with his business conducted here in Croatia. He referred to Eurostat data for 2020, according to which 55% of Croatian citizens made purchases online, mostly clothes, food from restaurants and groceries, revealing the benefits of grocery delivery services to your doorstep during a pandemic.

"Even when the pandemic ends, grocery delivery services will continue to be used, so Croatia certainly has the potential to introduce the Bolt Market,'' stated Liberman.

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You might have noticed people in bright coloured shirts riding around on bikes in Croatia over the last year or so. These independent delivery services are becoming more and more popular with the Croatian population, and they quickly deliver everything from food to medicine.

As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 27th of August, 2019, after annoying some of Zagreb's hospitality facility owners by listing them in their application (app) without their explicit permission, Glovo has gone from strength to strength and employed more than 400 people to do deliveries around the city after being in business for just five months in Zagreb.

In addition, they now cooperate with more than 100 hospitality facility owners, some of whom are offering their services online for the very first time, and finally entering the 21st century, according to a report from Vecernji list.

''We're already number one, and we want to continue in that direction," says Teo Širola, CEO of Glovo Services for Croatia, an international company that has grown from a startup for on-demand delivery from Barcelona in 2015, to having a value estimated at 300 million euros (2018), in just a few years.

That being said, the company isn't going public with the number of daily deliveries, explains Širola. But in their first year of business in Croatia, they aim for 1,000 employees doing the deliveries and about 100,000 deliveries per month.

"You order, we'll deliver," is the slogan of their application, and it is in "translation", it states that they will deliver, directly to the customer's address, anything that fits into their rather large delivery bag. And that - unlike the competition that is mainly food-oriented, they'll deliver gifts, medicines, groceries, books, coffee and cakes, and as of fairly recently, even McDonald's food. 

Glovo also collaborates with McDonald's in some other countries, too, and began delivering from three popular McDonald's restaurants in Zagreb quite recently.

"Delivery is the fastest growing food sales channel in the restaurant business today, and this trend will continue in the coming years. It was logical to expand our delivery service because it allows us to have an additional sales channel and to grow our business,'' stated McDonald's, adding that they're going to continue with this type of delivery expansion.

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