Chowdeck’s Black Friday Push: nearly $1M in sales and a new growth milestone

Chowdeck turned Nigeria’s now-familiar Black Friday moment into a major win for online food delivery, generating roughly ₦1.4 billion (about $975,900) across a four-day promotion and demonstrating how fast the country’s delivery market is maturing.

Fast numbers, faster growth

Chowdeck ran its Black Friday promotion from Friday, November 28 to Monday, December 1, offering discounted meals, free-delivery vouchers and city-specific flash price drops across Lagos, Abuja, Ibadan and other cities. The results on its live dashboard tell the story:

• Revenue: ₦1.4 billion (~$975,909)

• Orders fulfilled: about 182,740 over the four days (it had already hit 51,000 orders by 9:08 p.m. WAT on November 28)

• Distance covered: more than 727,000 kilometres, the most the company has logged during any promotional window

Those figures smashed Chowdeck’s internal goal to double orders compared with its inaugural Black Friday last year, and underline the company’s accelerating scale after recent milestones.

Momentum before the promotion

This Black Friday performance built on momentum Chowdeck had already established. In October the company announced it had crossed 1 million monthly orders across Nigeria; days earlier its CEO and co-founder, Femi Aluko, had noted daily orders rising from roughly 30,000 to over 40,000 and climbing: “This milestone reminds us of what is possible when people believe in what we’re building,” he wrote on X on November 3.

We just concluded Black Friday - Cyber Monday. My personal top four highlights:

1. We crossed 52k orders in a day
2. Our vendors grossed N642M in the whole of 2022. Last weekend, they hit N1.4B!
3. We hit 115 orders per minute!
4: A rider earned 205k in the four days!

We wrote…

— Femi Aluko (@LordBinary_) December 3, 2025

Why the market matters now

A few structural factors explain why food-delivery platforms can turn a short sale window into massive returns:

• Scale of digital access. Nigeria had roughly 107 million internet users at the start of 2025 — nearly 45% of the population — creating a sizable pool of potential app users.

• Improved platform infrastructure. Continuous investment in logistics, payments and merchant tooling has let companies handle volatile demand spikes. Chowdeck, for example, acquired POS startup Mira in 2025 to better integrate payments and merchant services, and closed a $9 million Series A led by Novastar Ventures in August to expand quick-commerce offerings.

Those two dynamics — user scale plus stronger infrastructure — let promotions like Black Friday serve as efficient user-acquisition and revenue windows rather than loss-making gambits.

How Chowdeck built a logistics edge

Chowdeck entered the market in October 2021, at a time when many saw food delivery in Nigeria as an unprofitable, hard-to-scale vertical. Competitors such as Bolt Food, Jumia Food and OFood had already struggled regionally. Chowdeck’s response was to design a logistics-first model focused on:

• geolocation and demand batching,

• targeted rider incentives, and

• tight in-app navigation and restaurant partnerships.

That operational emphasis helped the company scale quickly in dense urban areas and manage surge demand during events like Black Friday.

The human moment behind the idea

The startup’s origin story is telling. On its website, Aluko recalls testing positive for COVID on December 31, 2020 and struggling to find a delivery during the holiday: “I spent the entire January 1 looking for food vendors to deliver food to me but the available food delivery providers didn’t deliver during public holidays. I eventually found one after many hours and ended up paying 4x the regular amount.” That frustration — shared by many city residents — pointed to a gap for reliable, on-demand delivery.

Demand drivers: urban life and economic pressure

Even as many Nigerians contend with rising costs for food, fuel and living expenses, the realities of urban life — congested commutes, unreliable power, longer working hours and limited time — have made delivery an attractive tradeoff. For many, ordering in is less about luxury and more about reclaiming time.

Industry data support this behavioural shift. Food delivery, tracked by Paystack via Foodpod, grew at a 187% CAGR between 2021 and 2024, and a wave of new entrants — FoodCourt, Chowcentral, Heyfood, MANO and others — helped normalize fast delivery across cities.

User and rider scale vs. legacy players

Chowdeck’s growth curve illustrates how the market has rebounded from earlier setbacks. From a modest 319 users at launch (Oct 2021) the company expanded to 17,900 users in 2022, 250,000 in 2023, and surpassed 1 million by 2024. Where Jumia Food once ran in three cities with ~80 couriers, Chowdeck now deploys more than 20,000 riders and is executing 40,000+ daily orders.

Competition and promotional behaviour

Chowdeck wasn’t alone over Black Friday. Glovo also ran discounts and free-delivery deals between November 28 and 30, though it did not disclose order volumes or revenue. The competitive activity reinforces a larger point: promotions work when apps combine discounts with dependable logistics and localized merchant networks.

What this means going forward

Black Friday’s haul confirms that Nigeria’s food-delivery industry has moved past early skepticism. With rising digital penetration, targeted investment in infrastructure, and persistent urban demand for convenience, platforms that get logistics and merchant relationships right can convert short promotions into long-term user loyalty and meaningful revenue growth.