Do you want a side of socials with your fast food? Spain’s Glovo, a food delivery and quick commerce service where the bulk of orders are for ready-to-eat food, is experimenting with adding a bundle of social features to drive more in-app activity.
It’s also letting restaurant partners upload food preparation videos to spice up the user experience by being able to push a feed of rich media at its users.
Glovo says the new social features will let users find and connect with friends who are also using the app. This is powered by matching a user’s phone contacts to existing Glovo users and sending permission requests to connect. It enables users who opt in to be able to share recommendations and discover restaurants their friends have liked.
Another new feature called “Picks” lets Glovo users save and organize their favorite restaurants by creating and managing lists. These picks/lists can be private or shareable with friends.
For the food videos feature, the app is replicating the vertical feed that’s popular on social media apps like TikTok to give restaurants a new marketing opportunity — letting them display a showreel of stuff on their menu.
Glovo is not producing any of the food videos itself but does apply guidelines to submissions from restaurants, which it says are intended to ensure high quality (it says it’s had close to 400 submissions so far). “The content is strictly focused on the food offered, and other types of promotions are not allowed,” it noted.
The app updates, which Glovo previewed at a new annual product event called Glovo Next, will go live in its home city of Barcelona first before being rolled out to other cities in Spain this month. If all goes to plan, the company says it will keep expanding the rollout to reach the other 22 countries where it operates.
Food decisions made even easier?
While the quick commerce category in general has been through a bumpy ride over the last few years, undergoing something of a post-pandemic correction, Glovo — which is owned by Germany’s Delivery Hero — denies the new updates are a response to any flagging consumer interest in its delivery app.
“Glovo shows an outstanding GMV [Gross Merchandise Volume] growth trajectory (+44% FY2022 versus FY2024) with strong performance across all countries,” Daniel Alonso, Glovo’s vice president product, told TechCrunch.
Adjusted EBITDA is expected to improve by around 10 percentage points compared to how the company was operating before its late 2021 acquisition by Delivery Hero, he also said — crediting this to continued growth in profitable markets and to “less mature markets” scaling up.
Glovo is expected to reach positive adjusted EBITDA in the second half of this year, Alonso added.
The company also told us its quick commerce division — which offers speedy deliveries of grocery items, flowers, books, pet supplies, toiletries, and electronics picked out of stock ranged at its city center-located dark stores — is growing at over 50% year-over-year.
So if growth on its straightforward, transactional app is strong why has it decided to experiment with layering social media stickiness on top? Alonso says this is about Glovo continuing its brand building efforts and looking for ways to help users with the tricky decision of what meal to order in tonight.
The company said it hopes the features will boost food discoverability, including by tapping into the pull of friend-based recommendations. “We believe that building a social network inside Glovo will help users to make food ordering decisions and more,” said Alonso. “We have built an MVP to see whether this is the case, and time will tell if this is going to be successful.”
“Deciding what to order can be overwhelming with so many options,” he added. “The video discovery wall adds a dynamic, visual element to food exploration, making the process easier and more engaging. These videos, created by local restaurants, allow users to see how dishes are prepared and what they look like, helping them make more informed choices.”
On the permissions and privacy side, Alonso claimed: “Glovo does not share or upload any data without explicit consent.”
He said a user must actively grant access to their contact list in order to add friends — who must themselves provide express consent to connecting with the requested user before any information about their food delivery habits gets shared with friends.
“In order to see which of your friends have rated positively or have placed an order, you need to ensure that they have become your Glovo friends,” he noted, adding: “The shared data includes restaurants the user’s friends have ordered from in the last three months.”
Glovo users are able to revoke consent previously given to accessing their contacts, per Alonso, and can remove friends from their social list at any time after they’ve been added.
Additionally, Alonso confirmed that only contacts who are already Glovo users can receive an invitation to connect, so this isn’t that particular (notorious) growth hacking trick.