---
title: "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."
datePublished: 2023-11-20
dateModified: 2023-11-20
originalLang: en
section: economy
sections: ["economy","society"]
authors: ["Sami Miettinen"]
tags: ["Neuvottelija","EP223","Verkkokauppa","Päivittäistavarakauppa","Logistiikka","Ruokahävikki","Kasvuyritykset","Kaupallinen yhteistyö","Juhana Rintala"]
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/ai/ep223-ruoka-kotiin-verkkokaupasta-juhana-rintala/
---
# Groceries delivered home | Juhana Rintala | Negotiator 223

# 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.

| Picking method | Throughput |
|---|---|
| Automated warehouse | **around 200 lines per hour** |
| In-store picking | **under 100 lines per hour** |
| Recipe-based box picking | higher, because the range is narrow |

**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.