How we deliver in under 30 minutes

When we tell customers that most orders arrive in under 30 minutes, we get a lot of sceptical looks. Dar es Salaam traffic is legendary. But we've spent two years engineering a system that makes it consistently possible — and here's how.

Zone-based rider allocation. Rather than dispatching from a central pool, our riders are assigned to specific zones of roughly 2km radius. Each zone has 3–5 active riders at peak hours. When an order comes in, the nearest rider to the relevant market is assigned immediately — not after a matching algorithm runs, within milliseconds.

Pre-positioned riders. Our data shows that 70% of orders come from a predictable set of market-neighbourhood pairs. During peak hours (7–10 AM and 5–8 PM), we pre-position riders between high-demand markets and residential areas rather than waiting for orders to come in.

Vendor preparation time. We give vendors a 3-minute head start before dispatching a rider. This means by the time the rider arrives at the market stall, the order is already packed and waiting. No standing around while produce is weighed and bagged.

Route optimisation. Our routing engine updates every 90 seconds using live traffic data. If a road becomes congested, the rider's app automatically suggests an alternative before they reach the bottleneck.

The result: our median delivery time is 23 minutes, and 87% of orders arrive within the 30-minute window we promise. We're working toward 25 minutes as the standard, and 15 minutes for orders within 1km of a market.