Stoqo Facilitates Culinary Business for Grocery Shopping

Stoqo is an online supplier providing a variety of grocery for culinary business. They connect distributors of various groceries - such as cooking oil, coffee, flour etc - on one platform. In addition, for some ingredients, such as fresh vegetables and meat, customers are connected to the market sellers. Stoqo's main targets are the owners of restaurant, cafe, catering, and home-based culinary business.

In order to maximize operation this year, Stoqo is reportedly having raised a series A funding from Monk's Hill Partners and Accel Partners India at the end of December 2018. There's no information of further details and nominal. Previously, Stoqo became one of nine startups with opportunity to join the Alibaba's acceleration program eFounders Fellowship in Hangzhou.

Aswin Andrison (Stoqo's Co-founder and CEO) started Stoqo from selling rice in Cipinang. Then, he had to deliver orders directly to each customer. Business model digitization have them acquired more than 2500 types of products which currently on demand in the culinary business. Stoqo's vision: "to empower the underserved to work for a better life."

"The segment crowded with players is e-commerce B2C. In B2B, especially for culinary business grocery, Stoqo is one pioneer," Andrison said in an interview with SWA.

Stoqo provides delivery service for 6 days a week. The fastest delivery is tomorrow, for any order submitted before 2 pm. By ordering more than Rp300,000, they're making free delivery, it's for additional value due to culinary players are quite "sensitive" with this kind of cost.

Customers don't have to pay in advance, COD is available. Currently, Stoqo only serves around Jakarta, Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, and Bekasi.

As a B2B commerce, Stoqo provides partnership opportunities for suppliers of culinary grocery. In providing efficiency for logistics, Stoqo has lanched STOQOHub in Pasar Rebo. It's a storage house for raw materials from suppliers before being delivered to consumers.

"As it implies, STOQOHub #1 reflects STOQO's heart or operational center to facilitate Customer Experience and Operational team to serve customers," he said.

Aside from Andrison, Stoqo has another co-founder and also CTO, Angky William. Previously, Andrian worked as a consultant at McKinsey, and Angky was a software engineer at Amazon.

As Andrison said, the grocery procurement for SMEs engaged in culinary industry is quite challenging. Using proper and efficient management, it can grow 40%-60% profits. However, when something goes wrong, it'll sent the business to bankruptcy, kind of risky. What Stoqo did was using technology to make SME's players more productive, encouraging business optimization and product innovation.

– Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian