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Picnic B.V.
Picnic is an online supermarket that delivers groceries to customers' doorsteps, mostly through electric vans, and charges them low prices with no delivery fees.
Picnic is an online-only supermarket. You open its app, fill a virtual basket with milk, bread, vegetables, and whatever else you need, pick a free delivery slot, and a driver brings it to your door. There are no stores to walk into, no shelves to restock, and no cashiers. The whole thing runs from a handful of large warehouses and a fleet of small electric vans.
The company makes money the same way any grocer does: it buys groceries cheaply from suppliers and sells them to customers at a slight markup. Its pitch is that because it skips the rent, staff, and waste of physical supermarkets, it can offer everyday low prices and free delivery. Customers order ahead and pick a time window, so Picnic can plan its routes carefully and keep costs down. It started in 2015 in Amersfoort and has grown across the Netherlands, and later into Germany and France, mostly by word of mouth. It doesn't run flashy ads; happy customers tend to recommend it to neighbors. Picnic is a private company, backed by investors rather than sold on a stock exchange, so there's no share price to track. Its model depends heavily on scale and logistics. The more people who order in a neighborhood, the more efficient each delivery route becomes. That's why it expands city by city rather than country by country. Its main competition is traditional supermarkets like Ahold Delhaize and Jumbo, plus other online grocery players, but Picnic's all-electric fleet and app-only model give it a distinctive identity.
The business is a bet that grocery shopping is shifting online the way music and books did, but slowly, because fresh food and tight margins make it hard. Picnic has raised substantial money to build out its warehouses and vans, and it has focused on getting operations right before expanding too fast. Whether it becomes a durable, profitable grocer or stays a well-funded experiment is the question that matters most.
Saved answer · last researched 10 Nov 2026
BIG PICTURE
Picnic lost 272 million euros while its Dutch sales jumped 16 percent
- 16% Dutch sales growth in 2025
- 84% Rest of the market
Picnic's Dutch sales rose 16 percent last year, lifting its share of the Dutch grocery market from 1.8 to 2.1 percent. Yet the company still lost 272 million euros overall. It is buying growth: customers get low prices and free delivery, and Picnic builds the electric vans and warehouses to serve them. The bet is that scale comes first and profit later. Source: WielerFlits, data from 2025
Timeline
Picnic Starts Delivering Groceries
Picnic began in 2015 in Amersfoort, a Dutch city, with a simple idea: be a supermarket that exists only in an app. You order on your phone, electric vans bring the groceries to your door for free, and the prices stay low. The trick was that no stores meant no store costs, so the savings could go to the customer.
Picnic Crosses Into Germany
A few years later, the company did something ambitious for a young grocery startup: it crossed a border. Germany was its first foreign market, and it would not be its last. That first step abroad turned out to be the start of the company's biggest engine for growth.
A Big Funding Round and a Robot Warehouse
In 2019, investors put a quarter of a billion euros into Picnic. Some of that money went into a robot-run warehouse in Utrecht, built to handle a huge volume of orders each week. By then the company had about a thousand electric vans on the road in the Netherlands and Germany, a fleet that made its green pitch real rather than just talk.
The Gates Foundation Backs Picnic
The next round was even bigger and came with a striking name attached: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust led a 600 million euro investment. The money went into tech hiring, more automated warehouses, the electric fleet, and a push into France and Germany. France began in the Lille area, another step in the same pattern: raise money, build robots, buy vans, enter a new country.
Another Raise as Revenue Jumps
By 2024 the plan seemed to be working. Revenue had grown 40% to 1.25 billion euros, and much of that came from abroad, with German cities like Hamburg doing heavy lifting. Investors put in another 355 million euros to keep expanding in France and Germany and to automate more distribution centers, adding to the robot sites already running in Utrecht and Ridderkerk.
First Profit in the Netherlands
Ten years after founding, Picnic finally made a small operational profit in its home market, the Netherlands. The catch was that the company as a whole still lost a lot of money, because it kept pouring cash into German warehouses while revenue climbed to 1.9 billion euros. Founder Michiel Muller described this as deliberate: invest, grow, grab market share, and let profit come later.
Picnic Hires an Amazon Veteran
To run that next phase, Picnic brought in Eva Faict, who had spent 11 years at Amazon and had run its Belgium and Netherlands business, to lead international operations. The hire sent a clear signal: after years of building its own playbook, Picnic wanted someone who had scaled e-commerce at the biggest name in the game, as it pushed across the Netherlands, Germany and France.