By Kune Foods made its first step in January 2022 after raising Sh114 million ($1 million) of pre-seed financing from local and international investors. This was months after the food startup was marred with controversy after the CEO stated that Kenya didn’t have a strong food culture, and Kune was here to change that.
Founded by French entrepreneur Robin Reecht in 2020, Kune is a food delivery service that aimed to provide busy, modern Nairobians with access to freshly prepared meals at affordable prices, how? Kune promised ready meals would be at least half, if not three times, less than the typical price of restaurants and fast food.
Kune would be based on a hybrid model combining both cloud and dark kitchen concepts, all Kune meals would be made and packaged on-site at its factory “hub”, and then delivered on-demand directly to both its online customers who would order through its website and mobile app.
Also Read: Controversial food-tech startup Kune Unveils New App, Seeks to Raise Sh400 Million
Fast forward to June 2022, try to order on the website, you can’t. You get four options, order via Glovo, Jumia Foods, Uber Eats, or Bolt Food. The startup is now exclusively selling on the very platforms it was here to disrupt.
Am I reetching? or did the CEO say “After three days of coming into Kenya, I asked where I can get great food at a cheap price, and everybody told me it’s impossible… It’s impossible because either you go to the street and you eat street food, which is really cheap but of not-so-good quality, or you order on Uber Eats, Glovo, or Jumia.”
Reecht had told Quartz that the startup was continuously raising funding to build an entire factory, hire 30 people in production, 100 delivery drivers, 10-15 marketers, and 10-15 user experience people, among others, how is that going? The company had also promised customers that delivery will be done on an average of 30 minutes daily, wouldn’t using a middle man make this out of their control?
“Our strategy is to internalize all production and human resources capacities,” lol. What about the plan to build its own fleet of 100 electric motorcycles and hire 100 female drivers?
Let’s dive deeper and head over to Uber eats and check the prices that are disrupting the food market.
From the above screenshots, is Kune really selling any African food at 75% of the price?
Kenyans said it, and I will say it again, Kune is just another white-founded startup that aims to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.
At the TechTrendsKE website Kune claims to be selling 400 meals a day. Assuming a gross profit of $1 per meal, that’s $400 or gross profit a day and $12,000 a month. That paltry $12k is needed to fund their hefty overheads, e.g. inflated salos for the bigshots, rent, utilities, etc.