Eight years after it was created in Luxembourg, food delivery platform Wedely has captured 85% of the market share. Founders Filippo Biasotto and Emanuele Chichi share their recipe for success.
Italians have a close relationship with food so when Filippo Biasotto and Emanuele Chichi’s Italian IT company was tasked with creating a food delivery solution, the market was quick to embrace it.
In 2015, they created Wedely in Luxembourg to transform the relationship between consumers and restaurants. They built a web platform restaurant aggregator and then added delivery functionality. However, compared to Italy, the Luxembourg market took a little longer to convince. “We came from Italy with a new service that no-one knew about. It wasn’t easy to reach out and convince the restaurants,” recalls Biasotto.
The firm’s professionalism and market responsiveness quickly paid off. Wedely secured business partnerships with franchises including McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, deals that were a watershed moment for the firm.
It also dominated the market without giving away equity or taking a loan. Its founders credit the success to its proprietary software, which it says offers the flexibility, responsiveness and simplicity business customers required.
“We didn’t reinvent the wheel. But what we did, we did well. That’s probably the reason we grew very well compared to the competitors,” said Chichi, adding: “Because we spent a lot of time defining everything related to the software and the app and the user experience to speed up the creation of the orders. And people are generally happy to create orders with us because it is clearly easy and fast.”
The Covid-19 pandemic, while devastating for the food and drink sector, helped further Wedely’s market visibility. And in 2022, Wedely made acquisitions, enabling it to offer a wider range of services in different market areas.
Headquartered in Capellen, the firm has no immediate plans to expand its team of experts. But new functionality is planned for the platform, even if the founders were tight-lipped about the details.
