Bolt Food has partnered with supermarket chain Quickmart to enter grocery delivery in Kenya, announced on 4 June 2026. The deal gives Bolt access to over 12,000 products across Quickmart’s 64 store network in Kenya.
Bolt is using Quickmart’s existing stores as fulfilment points rather than operating its own warehouses. In January 2025, Bolt trialled a different approach for Qcommerce with Bolt Market, which was a hub-based model in Kilimani, Nairobi, offering around 2,000 SKUs from a central logistics hub within a 10km radius. The Quickmart deal is a significant step up: six times the product range, 60-plus store locations instead of a single hub, and no inventory risk for Bolt.
Until this deal, Bolt Food was the only major delivery platform in Kenya without a supermarket partner. Glovo has partnerships with Naivas, Carrefour, Chandarana Foodplus and Quickmart itself, having signed with Quickmart in September 2023. Uber Eats also works with Naivas, Carrefour, Quickmart and Chandarana. Jumia Food, which had also competed in Qcommerce, shut down its Kenyan operations at the end of 2023.
Restaurant delivery, Bolt’s other delivery business in Kenya aside its ride hailing service, is comparatively low-margin and crowded. Grocery delivery basket sizes are typically two to three times larger than a restaurant order, customers reorder weekly rather than occasionally, and the delivery cost to the platform is roughly the same regardless of what’s in the bag. For Bolt, the margin per delivery would improve significantly.
In Africa, Bolt Food currently operates in Kenya and Ghana. The company shut down its food delivery operations in Nigeria and South Africa in December 2023 after heavy investments failed to capture enough market share. Bolt Food launched in South Africa in April 2020, operating in Johannesburg and Cape Town, but found it difficult to compete with established market leaders like Uber Eats and Mr D. Similarly, its October 2021 expansion into Nigeria’s greater Lagos area was ultimately squeezed out by well-funded, early moving local competitors like Chowdeck.
