In February 2019 I wrote my first impressions of a yellow-branded on-demand delivery app that had just arrived in Nairobi, and a couple of weeks later I set out four reasons why it could become Kenya’s killer on-demand delivery app. In June 2021 I sat down with its co-founder and CEO, Oscar Pierre, on his visit to Kenya, at a point when Glovo was valued at over US$2 billion and had just announced a US$60 million Africa expansion plan. This week I sat down with the person who has run the Kenyan business through most of what followed.

Caroline Mutuku has been Country Managing Director of Glovo Kenya since November 2022, after leading Swvl’s intra-city business in Nairobi, nearly six years at McKinsey and Company and the formative years of her career at Standard Chartered Bank. She says the business has grown four times over in three and a half years under her leadership. In May this year Glovo opened a new Nairobi headquarters and committed a further KES 10 billion of investment in Kenya by 2030. It reports more than 6,000 merchants, 2,200 active riders a day, 12 towns and cities, and growth of around 40 per cent year on year. In July 2026, Uber agreed to acquire Delivery Hero, the German group that owns 94 per cent of Glovo, in a deal worth about 13 billion euros, with Kenya placed squarely in Uber’s portfolio.

Our conversation was recorded as the pre-event episode of the Pure Digital Passion Podcast for Glovo Kenya’s Future of Commerce Summit, which takes place on Friday the 23rd October 2026 at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Upper Hill, Nairobi, where I will be moderating the opening panel. 

From The Boardroom To The Street

I opened with the obvious question. Why leave a decade of banking and consulting for one of the most operationally punishing businesses in the city? Her answer was about pioneering. She wanted to be part of an industry that was still being built, and she wanted the impact to be tangible: merchants getting access to the digital marketplace and young people getting earning opportunities in an economy that was only just taking shape.

The first 90 days were an education in how little of the global playbook survives contact with Nairobi. “In this industry you are building as you go. There is very little documented for sub-Saharan Africa, because most of the companies are coming from the US or European markets,” she told me. The international frameworks had to be rebuilt for a city where Google Maps does not always work, where riders had never navigated by app, and where restaurants being asked for a full menu, images and descriptions had never sold anything online in their lives. The strategy was written, tested against the market, and rewritten whenever things failed.

What 4X Growth Actually Changes

The scale is the easy part to describe. When she joined, Caroline says there were about 33 people in the Kenya office; today there are more than 100. The difficult part is what growth does to the relationship with partners. “If you say you’ve grown 4x, the quality of insights that you have to bring to them changes significantly, because you go from accounting for a very small part of their business to becoming a significant part of their business, and you have to become a real partner, a trusted partner,” she said.

The geography changed too, and this was the detail that surprised me to be honest. “If you drew a five-kilometre radius in Westlands, 80 per cent of the orders were coming from those neighbourhoods alone. At this time, Nairobi is 80 per cent, not just Westlands.” Serving Westlands, Kilimani and Lavington, with their density of restaurants and grocery stores, is one business. Serving the middle-income neighbourhoods on the outskirts, at the price and service level those customers expect, is a different one, and she counts cracking it as one of the things the team has done well over the last four years.

In The Beginning, Food Defined Glovo As Books Did Amazon 

Caroline shared an interesting insight during our conversation as far as Glovo’s category expansion in Kenya is concerned. “Food is what Glovo is known for. Food is like what books were to Amazon.” Just as Amazon used books to build the habit and the logistics before selling everything else, Glovo used food to earn the right to sell groceries, pharmacy and personal care, and now electronics.

Even more interesing is how data-driven insights underpinned each forward step. Customers were searching for milk, cooking oil, rice and washing powder, so Glovo went into groceries in a big way. In 2023 it did not have Quickmart; it already had Naivas, Carrefour and Chandarana. Today, she says, every major supermarket chain in Kenya is on the platform, with Cleanshelf onboarded this year and expanded to every location inside Glovo’s service zones. 

Searches for beauty and personal care brought in the pharmacies. Searches for chargers brought in electronics, with Hotpoint launched as a major partnership in May 2026 and Ramtons following. This led to the searches changing again. “Initially with electronics, people are buying chargers, but now some of the searches we are seeing are for a TV and a fridge. We do not do big appliances. But this is what the customers are searching for, so how do you actually provide the service they are looking for on the app?” Those conversations with partners are now under way.

The Data Rewrote The Opening Hours

The same search data changed when the platform is open. “We used to open Nairobi at 8am and close at 10pm. Then we started to see that even before we opened, customers would come to the app and they would be looking for breakfast items. So now we open Nairobi at 7.00 am. Actually, now we are even seeing people at 6.30 am going to the app looking for bread, Blue Band and milk.” Nairobi, Karen, Ngong, Ongata Rongai and Mombasa all open at 7.00 am. Breakfast, she says, is one of the fastest-growing occasions on the platform, already up more than 50 per cent year on year. At the other end of the day, Nairobi now runs until 2.00 am on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with some restaurant and grocery partners operating 24 hours to serve it.

Her view of the difference between digital and physical retail is clear and, I think, correct. “You don’t enjoy going to the supermarket to buy toiletries. It’s not a hobby. It’s functional.” Functional purchases move fully digital. Choosing a cut of meat or a cheese, or gourmet shopping with the family, stays in the mall. The twist is that even the considered purchases are being split: customers go to the store to choose a fridge, go home, and order it online.

Why Kenya Is The Quick Commerce Outlier

In May 2026, Glovo co-founder Sacha Michaud said quick commerce, meaning groceries, pharmacy, electronics and everyday items, was about 40 per cent of Glovo’s Kenyan operations against roughly 10 per cent in other markets. I asked Caroline why. Her answer had four reasons, and it’s quite possibly the best explanation of Kenyan digital commerce behaviour I have heard to-date. 

First, supply: every major retailer is on the platform, so a customer can buy ten items from one grocer and the rest from another in a single app. Second, habit: Kenyans spend more time on social media than almost anyone, so apps are second nature. Third, trust, and this is the one that matters most. “Our level of trust with online started maybe 20 years ago with the advent of mobile money in Kenya. If we trust apps with our money, then trusting an app with our grocery shopping, the habit is already there.” Fourth, demography: she put Kenya’s average age at 19 against 44 in Europe, a youthful population that has never known a pre-digital world.

She added a key point that explains a lot! Until recently most Kenyan grocery stores existed inside malls, which meant commuting, parking, trolleys and children adding random items to the basket. In Europe there is a shop on every corner. The friction of physical grocery shopping in Nairobi is simply higher, so the pull of delivery is stronger. She also offered one line I expect to quote for years: “The biggest competition to food is the fridge.” If the customer is not ordering cooked food, they are stocking up, and Glovo wants to be the app they do both in.

Switching On Nakuru, Eldoret & Kisumu

The playbook for a new city, Caroline says, is the same everywhere; what differs is the stage the city is at. Nairobi is advanced, though not uniformly, since Glovo manages the capital neighbourhood by neighbourhood. Mombasa is a close second. Nakuru, Eldoret and Kisumu are growing very fast from a small base. In Westlands you will see four or five Glovo bags within ten minutes and stickers on every restaurant wall. In a smaller town, it takes time to see a bag go past, and trust has to be built on both sides of the marketplace.

That is where the partner academies come in, and her description of what online service means to a restaurant that has only ever served the customer in person is worth exploring in more detail. “Traditionally, for a restaurant, service is serving the customer that is sitting in front of you. When it’s online, service means very different things. Is my packaging right? Is there no spillage? If I ordered a drink and a meal, can you pack them separately? It also means that the image you put on the platform resembles what I’ll receive. Because even with local dishes, chapatis from two different stores don’t look the same.” The three priorities for a new town are customer education, merchant capability and enough rider supply to meet the demand that follows.

What A Single-Outlet Restaurant Gets Beyond Orders

About 80 per cent of Glovo’s merchants are SMEs, and Glovo says it has generated more than KES 20B in revenue for local businesses over six years. I asked what a duka or a single-outlet restaurant gets beyond the orders. Her first answer was existential. “If you’re not found online, you might not be found at all. This might not have been true in 2018, but it’s true now in 2026.” Given that agentic AI on the horizon, she argued, a customer may soon set an AI agent to order lunch every weekday without ever opening an app, and a merchant that is not on a platform will not be in that conversation at all.

The second answer was practical. The academies train merchants to run successful businesses, not only to succeed on Glovo. The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) and the Ministry of Co-operatives and MSME Development send staff to train business owners on compliance, because going online formalizes a business whether it intended that or not. Banks have come to previous Glovo events to pitch SME facilities. The one I think is most underrated is this: a weekly, formalized payment from a digital marketplace creates a financial history that a walk-in restaurant never had. She has seen merchants go from one location doing a few thousand shillings a month to tens of locations doing millions, hiring for both the dining room and the delivery business.

10 Apps / 1 App: The Retailer’s Dilemma

The question I most wanted answered, because I have written about it in the context of Carrefour’s own direct-to-consumer digital investment, is how Glovo lives alongside retailers that have built their own apps. Caroline’s answer is that customers choose platforms by occasion. The end-of-month shop of twenty or thirty thousand shillings goes to the retailer’s own app, where same-day or next-day delivery is fine. Glovo is for the just-in-time moment: more guests have arrived, you need more meat now, and it is there in under 45 minutes. That was not a service the grocers offered for a very long time.

Then she turned the question round. “Nairobi alone has maybe around 30,000 restaurants. If every restaurant builds their own app, are you going to download 100? At some point you’re like, I just want to go to one place where I can find everything in one application, I can compare prices, and I’ll get it within a few minutes.” Glovo Prime, the monthly subscription that removes delivery and service fees and bad-weather surcharges, is the retention mechanism that makes the single-app habit stick.

Why A Future of Commerce Summit & Why Now?

The summit began in Lagos in 2025 and comes to Kenya for the first time on the 23rd of October 2026. Caroline’s rationale was to the point. “We believe the industry is going through a defining moment, and we would like to bring our partners and brands along.” The examples she gave are the ones that should make all of us sit up and pay attention. Glovo is already integrated with ChatGPT and Claude: photograph a shopping list, ask which store will give you the cheapest basket, and the assistant will tell you, sometimes splitting the basket across two stores to save money. Meta’s Muse agent, launched in the United States in September 2026, can make purchases on a user’s behalf. In developed markets robots and drones are delivering food. Her argument is about timing: introduce partners to these trends now, not after the world has moved on.

The day itself will carry AI demonstrations from Kenyan and international companies, a retail media discussion, panels made up of partners and brands that are already working with Glovo, and awards for those that have performed best over the last twelve months. On retail media, her example was insightful. “If you open Glovo today, most likely you’ll see Coke, because Coke wants to be associated with food at the point of intent, the point of purchase.” Visa, likewise, is prominent because the customer is about to pay. Partner Ads are for merchants; Brand Ads are for FMCG and electronics brands; and Glovo will be showing new advertising assets at the summit. What she wants attendees to leave with is optimism about what AI can do in their own operations, and a clear sense of how to reach customers at the moment of purchase intent.

The Uber Question

I could not let her go without asking about what happened in July 2026. Her answer was careful and, in all fairness, the only one she could give, at this time. “The transaction is still going through regulatory approval, so it has not been approved yet. We are still waiting to see what the regulators will say from a continental perspective, but also from a global perspective. We are looking at another 12 months at least. Before then, we continue to serve our customers and collaborate very closely with the merchants and the riders on the platform. At that point, we might be better placed to comment.”

Glovo In 2030: When The App Could Disappear?

I asked her to imagine 2030, with the KES 10 billion spent and the Uber deal long closed. Her answer had three parts: a truly everyday app where anything a customer is looking for is available, including the large appliances customers are already searching for; a measurable contribution to GDP, which Glovo tracks internally; and the digital sector as one of the largest generators of earning opportunities for young Kenyans. She cited roughly 6 per cent of EU employment coming from the digital sector against around 23 per cent in China, and she takes it for granted that agentic AI will be part of the solution by then.

That is where the conversation ended up, and I found most interesting as someone who has not opened a bank’s website in possibly more than ten years because the app does everything. The ChatGPT and Claude integration, launched in Kenya in July 2026, already lets a customer find a product in the chatbot and add it directly in the Glovo app, one tap from checkout. The next step is obvious. “If I want to go healthy and I’m looking for protein-heavy meals, I should just be able to say, this is what I want to achieve in the next 180 days, generate what I should be eating every day. You don’t have to ever look at it. You just need to answer the doorbell once the rider arrives.” The platform’s job, in her words, is to make sure that whichever AI agent the customer uses chooses Glovo because it has everything the customer needs. The yellow app I reviewed in 2019 may, in time, stop being an app at all.

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