About Picnic

Picnic is the world's fastest growing online supermarket with a unique business model and a highly engaged customer base. Their mission is to make grocery shopping simple, fun, and affordable for everyone. By eliminating physical stores and deploying a fleet of electric Picnic Vehicles, the company delivers fresh groceries directly to customers’ doors. Their data-driven operations and innovative app design allow Picnic to operate leanly while scaling rapidly in markets like the Netherlands, France, and Germany.

Picnic's success is built on its promise to deliver within a 20-minute time window - a commitment that demands precision logistics, real-time coordination, and technology tailored to their unique vehicle fleet. With over 3,500 electric vehicles on the road and hundreds of thousands of monthly users, Picnic continues to lead in grocery delivery innovation.

Delivering on the 20-minute promise

To maintain its reputation as the “modern milkman”, Picnic needed to ensure every delivery was timely, safe, and optimized for their custom electric vehicles. Unlike generic navigation apps, Picnic’s system had to support low-speed, custom electric vehicles, account for narrow European streets, and manage tightly sequenced deliveries.

The team needed a flexible, customizable navigation solution that could embed directly into their driver app and provide granular control to enhance usability and precision.

Mapbox provides flexibility to innovate

Picnic initially launched with another major location provider, but soon sought a more flexible and cost-effective solution with a collaborative innovation mindset.

Mapbox stood out by offering a flexible location platform with modular APIs that could be tailored to Picnic’s unique operational needs and support every layer of the delivery experience. With the Navigation SDK, Picnic integrated real-time, in-app routing customized for the speed limits and dimensions of their electric delivery vans. The Directions API enabled pre-planning optimized routes — improving overall fleet efficiency. Meanwhile, the Search Box API and Geocoding API enhanced location accuracy. Customers can enter delivery locations using built-in autocomplete, helping them select the exact address. With Mapbox routable points, it ensures that delivery drivers are directed to the correct location, reducing delays and improving reliability.

Combining Mapbox services for a seamless driver experience

The Picnic tech team built an integrated logistics and delivery system around Mapbox to meet the complex needs of their grocery operations. Using the Mapbox Navigation SDK, Picnic delivers turn-by-turn navigation tailored to its custom electric delivery vans, which face routing constraints such as low speed limits and narrow European streets. The Directions API supports route planning, while real-time updates from the driver app help dynamically adjust ETAs and optimize delivery sequencing.

Accurate location data is also critical to meeting Picnic’s 20-minute delivery window. With the Mapbox Search Box API and Geocoding API, users can confidently input delivery locations, whether an apartment name, business name, or street address. This ensures drivers receive the most precise location possible, especially vital in dense urban areas, where navigating to the wrong side of the street could cause delays.

An added advantage of Mapbox Geocoding API is its permanent geocoding option, in contrast to traditional temporary geocoding. Picnic uses permanent geocodes to store customer delivery addresses for future use, improving efficiency and repeat accuracy.

Picnic uses the flexible Mapbox map styling to highlight house numbers and entrances, making navigation more intuitive and reducing missed stops. The team has designed their custom driver app and internal tools to support delivery planning and execution across five daily shifts, with Mapbox at the core of both the driver and dispatch experiences.

Mapbox design flexibility enabled full visual alignment with the Picnic brand, while the accuracy of its global POI and address data made it easy to scale into new cities seamlessly.

Optimal routing, on-time delivery, and a great customer experience

The customizable and scalable Mapbox platform continues to power innovation at Picnic, driving measurable business outcomes while delighting customers across Europe. Since integrating Mapbox, Picnic has improved its overall on-time delivery rate by 3%, now reliably meeting its 20-minute delivery window. 

A 4% reduction in average delivery time per order has translated into >2,000 fleet-wide hours saved weekly, helping Picnic expand its service footprint with sustainability. These high quality data and services not only make operations smarter and more efficient, they reinforce Picnic’s promise to customers: fresh groceries delivered exactly when expected.

As Picnic continues to scale into new European cities, Mapbox will remain a key technology partner — helping every driver stay safe and on time, and ensuring every family receives their groceries fresh and fast.

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