EP223 · Economy · first published 2023-11-20

Groceries delivered home | Juhana Rintala | Negotiator 223

NOTE: this episode was made in commercial collaboration with Ruokaboksi, the guest is the company's founder and CEO, and the host is one of its influencer marketing partners. All three are disclosed. This article separates the structural observations from the sales pitch. The parts that hold up are the choke point in Finland's concentrated grocery market, the picking-efficiency figures that explain why grocery e-commerce is hard, the reason Oda failed, and Wolt's small-market playbook as an expansion model. The transcript is auto-captioning, which is disclosed.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: AI and the Economy + AI and Society

Groceries delivered home | Juhana Rintala | Negotiator 223

Summary: NOTE: this episode was made in commercial collaboration with Ruokaboksi, the guest is the company’s founder and CEO, and the host is one of its influencer marketing partners. All three are disclosed. This article separates the structural observations from the sales pitch. The parts that hold up are the choke point in Finland’s concentrated grocery market, the picking-efficiency figures that explain why grocery e-commerce is hard, the reason Oda failed, and Wolt’s small-market playbook as an expansion model. The transcript is auto-captioning, which is disclosed.

Commercial collaboration — read this first

This episode was made in commercial collaboration with Ruokaboksi, and it is said aloud in the episode’s first seconds.

Three connections, all worth knowing:

• The guest is the company’s founder and CEO. Juhana Rintala is presenting his own business. That is the episode’s open purpose.
• The host is a customer. Sami Miettinen mentions in the episode that boxes have been arriving at his family’s home.
• The host is one of the company’s influencer marketing partners. The episode goes through the company’s customer acquisition channels, and the host is named among the influencers. This is the episode’s most significant single connection and it is worth keeping in mind throughout.

What this article does. Structural observations about the industry — those that hold regardless of what you think of the company — are foregrounded. Company- and product-specific passages are marked and treated briefly. No service is recommended.

One source note: there is no publisher caption track, so this article is based on YouTube auto-captioning. No verbatim quotation is used.

The recording is 21 November 2023.

1. The background that explains the perspective

Rintala’s career explains why the episode talks about an industry rather than only a product.

He has worked in the management team of Rimi Baltic in Latvia and, before that, as a consultant on grocery retail projects in the Baltics and the Nordics. He then moved to Stockholm to work for ICA. ICA is Sweden’s largest grocery retailer, and Rintala’s description of it is the episode’s most useful structural observation about chains:

ICA is a retailer-entrepreneur model, structurally like Kesko in Finland. Rintala calls the retailer dynamic a fine thing — and says in the same breath that it makes pushing changes through heavy going. He characterises ICA as almost an institution, and political.

This matters for the article, because it is the answer to why challengers arise at all: distributed retailer ownership makes a chain strong locally and slow to change centrally. The slowness is the gap a new operating model fits into.

Ruokaboksi was founded in 2017, when Rintala moved back to Finland with his family. The situation then was that a few operators existed but the business model had not yet broken through.

2. Covid, and what was left of it

The episode treats Covid’s effect with unusual honesty, because it does not claim the change was permanent.

What happened: people were told to stay at home and to fear the trip to the shop, schools were closed part of the time, and several meals a day had to be made at home. Demand exploded.

Rintala’s own assessment is unromantic: it was luck in timing. The service happened to be in a state where it could absorb the demand. It was not foresight.

And then the more important part: he says plainly that the Covid effect ended right there, when the news coverage and customers’ attention turned. In his view the right comparison is not the Covid year but the period before Covid, against which things are now roughly back to normal.

In an episode made in commercial collaboration this is an exceptional concession, and it is worth marking: the guest refuses to count the Covid spike as structural change.

3. The turn in financial markets — and why Oda failed

This is the episode’s most generalisable section, and it applies to any growth company.

The turn: with the war in Ukraine, capital markets shifted their emphasis from growth to profitability and cash flow. Previously hard growth was paid for, and it did not much matter what it cost.

The three variables in valuation Rintala names: growth, profitability and customer retention. The weight has shifted to the latter two.

And the qualification that makes the section professional. On retention Rintala says he prefers to speak of revenue retention rather than customer count, and adds that the absolute number is industry-specific and therefore not comparable as such. What matters is understanding how quickly a customer becomes profitable.

From which he draws the episode’s sharpest line, applicable to any business:

As long as these metrics are in your own hands, it is hard to run a bad business. Bad decisions happen when the metrics are not understood.

Oda. The Norwegian grocery e-commerce company that entered Finland and shut down. Rintala’s assessment is clear and should be read carefully, because it differs from the usual reading: Oda’s death had more to do with the financing market than with anything else. The company was growing in Finland. What ended was access to funding on terms under which loss-making growth could continue.

This is an important distinction, because it means the failure of a loss-making growth company is not necessarily proof that the business model does not work — it can be proof that the funding window closed. Which one it was is settled only by the next entrepreneur.

4. The choke point: why Finland’s grocery market is hard to enter

The episode’s most important structural argument, presented as a concept worth taking away.

Finland has one of the most concentrated grocery markets in the world. Two groups — S and K — dominate it.

The choke point. Rintala’s description of the value chain is simple and it explains everything else:

• At the start there are many producers.
• At the end there are many customers.
• In between is a very narrow point through which all the goods must pass.

And from that follows the challenger’s problem, which Rintala names using Oda’s example: there are hardly any wholesalers other than the chains themselves. If you buy from a wholesaler, you buy from your competitor — and you pay for it. The only way out is to source directly from producers, which is slow and requires a narrow range.

New Zealand. The episode raises an international experiment: New Zealand’s market is also extremely concentrated into two chains, and there they are trying an obligation to sell on at the same price to competitors as well. Rintala’s stance is interested but cautious — he thinks the attempt is good from a consumer’s point of view, because it would increase variety, but the outcome is still to be seen.

A Valio example is left half-finished in the episode and is marked here as imprecise: the speakers recall a case in which Valio bought a dairy and a limit was set on market share. The details go unconfirmed in the episode, so they are not repeated here as facts.

5. Picking efficiency — the figures that explain the industry

This is the episode’s most concrete content, and the best single reason to read the article to the end. The figures are Rintala’s and are not separately verified here, but they are well-known orders of magnitude in the industry.

And the observation that makes the figures matter. When a consumer goes to the shop themselves, they do that same picking work — up to an hour and a half at worst — for free. It is precisely that work people are unwilling to pay for, because they are used to doing it themselves.

This is the whole problem of grocery e-commerce in one sentence: the service sells labour the customer is used to getting at zero price. Margins are therefore structurally thin, and efficiency is not optimisation but a condition of existence.

The recipe-based model’s advantage lies here, and it is logical: when you pick complete recipes, the product range handled in a given week is narrow. A narrow range is fast to pick. The same feature that is a constraint for the consumer is operationally what makes the model possible.

Sami adds a comparison from London: in a large market it made sense for a chain to employ a picker to do the work, because volume carried the cost. The size of the market determines which model works — which is directly the subject of the next section.

6. Expansion: Wolt’s playbook

The episode’s most intellectually interesting section, and it is strategic analysis rather than advertising.

The starting point: HelloFresh is the industry’s giant. Rintala says he has just looked at its results announcement and notes drily that it has a billion euros in the bank. A direct confrontation is not an option.

But the giant has a constraint, and it is the basis of Rintala’s entire strategy: HelloFresh concentrates on the largest Western markets. That leaves large parts of the world entirely outside its focus.

The playbook is Wolt’s. Rintala names the model directly: Wolt sidestepped DoorDash and the other large players by going into Eastern European markets, and built a playbook there for how a small market is taken. Poland and the Czech Republic are named as targets.

And why the model suits a Finnish company is the episode’s best generalisation about firms from small countries:

A company that built its consumer service in Finland was born into a small market. Its scale, cost structure and mindset fit another small market — unlike a company that started in London or New York.

That is a structural competitive advantage rather than patriotism. A company from a small market is forced into an efficiency a company from a large one does not need — and that efficiency is the entry ticket to the next small market.

Execution model: one city at a time. Customer acquisition is done before the city opens, meaning sales are made well ahead of the launch date. The target in new markets is cash flow positive within two years, and the decisive metric is how deep the cash flow curve goes before it turns. The technology is ready; investment in a new market goes into the local team.

At the time of recording the company said it was negotiating financing. This article does not cover what came of that.

7. The operating model — marked as company-specific

These are the episode’s product passages. They are summarised here because they explain the logic above, not because they are being recommended.

• The product: a box containing recipes and their ingredients. The customer cooks the meal. The model sits between going to the shop and buying prepared food.
• What it solves: not the cooking but the question “what shall we eat today” — and having the ingredients at home.
• Delivery rhythm: orders are generally concentrated once a week, so logistics can be routed efficiently.
• There is no inventory. Ingredients are ordered only against customer orders already received — in practice just-in-time. The same applies to transport capacity: only what the orders require is booked.
• Sourcing: as directly from the producer as possible, without intermediaries.

The measure of customer feedback is the episode’s funniest and also its hardest. On Rintala’s account, success is measured by whether the children eat it too. If they do not, the customer does not order the next box, and the trial ended at one. Retention is therefore a direct measure of recipe quality — behaviour rather than a survey.

Sami raises the concept’s limit from his own family: fussy children are a brake. Rintala’s answer is not to deny it but to observe that in the families-with-children segment, quick and more traditional dishes are what stand out.

Marketing: the model is D2C (direct to consumer) rather than B2C — Rintala’s distinction is that the consumer is addressed directly where they are. The channels named are influencers and customer referrals, which Rintala regards as particularly important. Among the influencers he names Vappu Pimiä — and the host himself. This is where the episode’s connection is at its most visible.

8. Waste — the strongest claim and its caveats

The argument towards the end is environmental, and it should be read in two parts, because the first is checkable and the second not quite.

Part 1, which is true: roughly a third of all food produced in the world goes to waste. Rintala’s comparison — that if food waste were a country it would be among the world’s largest emitters — matches the established UN and FAO formulation, in which food waste would rank third after China and the United States. That is a genuinely large figure, not marketing.

Part 2, which is the company’s claim: an order-based model minimises waste, because ingredients are not ordered into inventory but against orders already placed. To this is added the notion of recipe waste: when a recipe specifies exact quantities, half an ingredient does not sit going off in the fridge.

The logic is sound. What the episode does not present is a comparison: how much waste arises in this model relative to a shop purchase, measured. The claim is therefore structurally plausible and empirically unverified — and the emissions from packaging and home delivery are not addressed at all. In lifecycle accounting those are the other side, without which the net effect cannot be known.

The health claim has to be treated the same way. Rintala’s argument is that health harms often come from over-processing of ingredients, and that food cooked yourself from fresh ingredients avoids that. He adds an honest explanation of why processing is done: it improves shelf availability and appeal — and raises margin. That is good, openly stated retail logic, and it is the episode’s most credible passage on health precisely because it explains the other side’s incentive rather than moralising about it.

9. Finally: what holds up

What holds regardless of the company:

• The choke point. When the middle of a value chain is a narrow point owned by the people you are competing against, a challenger’s only route is to bypass it — and that determines both the range and the rate of growth.
• The zero price of picking labour. Thin margins in grocery e-commerce are not a pricing error but a consequence of selling labour the customer is used to doing themselves.
• Oda and the funding window. A growth company’s failure does not by itself prove the model does not work; it can prove that financing terms changed.
• The small-market playbook. A consumer service built in a small country is structurally better suited to the next small market than a competitor from a large one.
• The valuation triad, and the observation that bad decisions come from not understanding the metrics.
• Refusing the Covid spike. The guest does not claim the change was permanent.

What is the company’s claim rather than a verified result:

• Waste minimisation relative to a shop purchase, with no comparison figure.
• The omission of packaging and delivery emissions from the waste calculation.
• The health claim about fresh ingredients in the form in which it is put.

These are ordinary features of commercial collaboration, and they are not especially egregious in this episode. They are marked here so the reader knows at which point the episode stops being industry analysis.

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