Picnic

Picnic was founded in 2015 by Michiel Muller, Daniel Gebler, Frederic Knaudt and Joris Beckers, launching its first grocery deliveries in the Dutch city of Amersfoort before growing into a company headquartered in Amsterdam, with the aim of rebuilding grocery retail around a smartphone app, a cashless "milkman" delivery model, and hyper-local automated distribution rather than physical supermarket branches.

The company operates exclusively through its own app: customers order groceries for free delivery in narrow, pre-booked time slots, fulfilled from regional distribution hubs and delivered on the last mile by small electric vehicles Picnic calls "pods." There is no walk-in retail presence and no delivery fee for standard orders, a structure Picnic says is subsidized by route density and automation rather than line-item mark-ups.

Since launching in the Netherlands, Picnic has expanded to Germany (2018) and France (2021), and by 2025 served roughly two million customers across around 200 towns and cities in the three countries from a network of regional distribution centres, including newer automated hubs such as the one in Oberhausen, Germany.

Picnic reported its first-ever operating profit in its home Dutch market in its 2025 financial year, a decade after launch, even as continued heavy capital spending on automated distribution centres in Germany kept the group as a whole in a net loss position.