Collectiv Food: The start-up disrupting the food supply industry

Collectiv Food claims its new model offers better prices, fresher products, transparency, traceability, and reliability while also delivering an automated and sustainable food supply service. Credit: View Apart / Shutterstock.

Collectiv Food is a business-to-business (B2B) food and drinks supply start-up that has created an online procurement platform to connect producers and professional kitchens directly, cutting out wholesalers. Companies like Collectiv Food and fellow start-up Choco could disrupt the wholesale food and beverages supply industry using innovative, tech-based and customer-centric models never seen before in this industry. This long-awaited transformation of food supply chains may lead to competitors (including wholesalers like Bidfood, Brakes and Transgourmet) struggling to keep up and even becoming obsolete.

The food supply industry is old-fashioned (largely paper-based), inefficient, opaque and slow to innovate. Its supply chains generate unnecessary emissions and waste and are not responding to consumer demand for transparency around where food comes from. It will not be viable or sustainable for the industry to carry on like this.

Launched in 2019 and now operating in both the UK and France, Collectiv Food claims its new model offers better prices, fresher products, transparency, traceability and reliability while also delivering an automated and sustainable food supply service.

Collectiv’s approach of avoiding wholesalers and delivering straight to the kitchen produces 50% less CO₂ emissions than current methods. This is due to a green last-mile delivery system that uses points of distribution (PODs) based in disused city locations instead of traditional freight methods, reducing the number of lorries in cities. This gives Collectiv Food a further edge over wholesalers since the UK Government has implemented air pollution regulations limiting large freight in cities and may soon introduce policies to further reduce the number of deliveries, especially in London. European law restricts how much a local government can charge for road usage, but Brexit means that the UK Government will have greater freedom on this matter. Companies that don’t rely on lorries won’t feel the impacts of these changes.

As well as sustainability, Collectiv Food can also offer its partners savings of between 5% and 25% on key products. These kinds of savings will be attractive for a hospitality industry that is trying to improve its margins in the post-Covid world. Traceability and transparency are also key parts of this model. The consumer will know exactly where their produce is from, which is especially important with increasing customer pressure for locally sourced food.

This month, Collectiv Food raised £12m in a Series A funding round. This is the largest recorded Series A for a managed B2B food marketplace in Europe and will be used to develop delivery and sourcing models and expand the company into the rest of Europe. Choco, based in Berlin and launched in 2018, like Collectiv, works to connect suppliers and restaurants on one digital platform. Choco has recently raised $100m in Series B funding.

The growth of Collectiv Food and Choco and their continued support from investors highlights the disruptive impact these start-ups could have on the industry and competitors. Collectiv Food has already seen a 200% growth in its customer base over the past year. Customers include Big Mamma Group, The Hush Collection, Dirty Bones, Megan’s, Crussh, Butchies, Cocotte, Tossed and Fresh Fitness Food. Its use of technology, streamlined supply chains and awareness of environmental and social issues concerning the customer could shake up an industry that has been stuck in its ways for too long. Wholesalers will have to shape up to avoid missing out.

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