Chowdeck processed nearly $1 million worth of deliveries in 2025’s Black Friday campaign season

Chowdeck, a four-year-old YC-backed delivery startup, facilitated 183,000 deliveries worth ₦1.4 billion (~$1 million) in four days, across cities in two countries. On average, each order was about ₦8,000 (~$6), reflecting the startup’s push down-market from food delivery to groceries and other petty items.

On Black Friday alone, Chowdeck hit a record number of over 52,000 deliveries in a single day, which is more than double their 25,000 single-day peak in 2024.

Like Stripe, Chowdeck invited everyone to see how they would perform during the Black Friday season. The delivery startup built a real-time tracker at bfcm.chowdeck.com that displayed total app visits, orders, fastest delivery time, distance covered, and the total amount spent. At its peak, Chowdeck processed 115 orders per minute and made its fastest delivery in just 90 seconds.

According to Chowdeck, nearly 2.5 million users visited its web tracker. The tracker, which also acts as a marketing tool for the company, could see some visitors filter through the funnel from awareness to becoming customers, boosting Chowdeck’s number of installations or registered users.

How Chowdeck won Black Friday in Nigeria

Black Friday didn’t exist in Nigeria until Jumia imported it in 2012.

Chowdeck took that tradition and pushed it into food delivery—discounted meals, flash sales in Lagos, Abuja, Ibadan, Accra, free delivery everywhere. By 9 PM (WAT) on November 28, they’d already passed 51,000 orders, beating their own internal target with hours left on the clock.

The infrastructure supporting this didn’t appear overnight. Chowdeck started in 2021 as a YC-backed food delivery company, then evolved into a logistics platform handling groceries, essentials, and other vendor deliveries. The model runs on geolocation, demand batching,and rider incentives—boring backend work that becomes critical when 52,000 orders are made in 24 hours.

Earlier this year, Chowdeck cut staff to let AI handle operations, then quietly started hiring human customer support again before Black Friday. Whether that was always the plan or a response to scaling pressure isn’t clear, but the timing suggests the company learned something about what AI can’t yet handle when order volumes spike. Routing and batching work fine with algorithms; managing customer chaos at 52,000 orders a day apparently doesn’t.

Monthly orders in Nigeria crossed 1 million recently, climbing from 30,000 daily to over 40,000 by November. The startup’s $9 million Series A in August is funding that expansion, and the Mira acquisition in June added payments and POS tools that push Chowdeck beyond delivery into commerce infrastructure. Over 20,000 riders now cover routes that competitors like Bolt Food, Jumia Food, and OFood either abandoned or couldn’t make profitable. Some of these riders use the less expensive two-wheelers, bicycles instead of bikes with engines.

About 109 million people in Nigeria use the internet, indicating a 45.5% penetration, which should be enough to support growth-stage digital-first businesses. However, purchasing power and disposable income are low. Yet, Nigerians spend a lot on food and airtime, both of which Chowdeck now offers, as they are high-frequency purchases that are central to survival. The food delivery market was $1.04 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $2.49 billion by 2033. Airtime, which is responsible for voice calls, messaging (SMS), and data, continues to see growth at an alarming pace. In the first half of 2025, Nigerians spent $1.8 billion (₦2.5 trillion) on airtime with MTN and Airtel, two of the country’s largest telcos, accounting for 85% of the market, which saw 175,082,900 monthly subscriptions in October.