The J Curve with Diego Barreto, CFO and VP of Strategy at iFood: Five Big Ideas

Diego Barreto is a CFO and VP of Strategy at Brazilian food tech's behemoth iFood, mentor at Endeavor and author of the best seller “Nova Economia”.

So how big is iFood and online delivery market opportunity exactly? Well, it’s a ROCKET SHIP 🚀👇🏻

✅ With 70m orders per month and 45m active users, iFood today holds 84%+ of all e-food delivery bookings in Brazil

✅ With a fleet of 300k riders iFood covers 1,500 cities in Brazil and works with 300k restaurants 🤯

✅ iFood’s single shareholder today is Prosus, an early backer of Tencent and one of the largest tech investors in the world that operates across sectors and markets with long-term growth potential. Its global portfolio of online food delivery companies includes Swiggy in India and Delivery Hero, which operates in 50 countries

✅ Revenue in the Online Food Delivery market is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2023-2027) of 11.29%, resulting in a projected market volume of US$25bn by 2027 (Statista)

✅ The market's largest segment is Grocery Delivery with a projected market volume of US$8bn in 2023. In the Meal Delivery segment, the number of users is expected to amount to 89.0m users by 2027. User penetration in the Meal Delivery segment will be at 32.8% in 2023 (Statista)

Here are FIVE big ideas from our conversation with Diego 🧐💡👇🏻:

1. AI is propelling the growth and improves the economics of online food delivery industry 💯 

   And iFood is staying on top of the trend: it has been investing in AI since 2018 and today has 500 data scientists, 2000 engineers and 125+ proprietary ML models in house. iFood partners with OpenAI for over a year.

2. The future of gig economy in Brazil lies in finding a middle ground between enterprise productivity gains and a set of social rights ⚖️

   Gig economy is the secret sauce to productivity and economy growth. However, operational benefits must be balanced with rights protection guaranteed by law

3. Doing business in Brazil is a challenging endeavor for startups due to complex regulations, bureaucracy and import barriers 🇧🇷

   Startups must be very strategic in terms of building a hard to replicate technological product and designing their go-to-market approach

4. The single most important factor that contributed to iFood’s market dominance today is the corporate culture

   The building blocks of iFood culture are the ambidextrous mindset, transparency, ownership and ‘quick and dirty’ approach to testing and learning

5. Mentorship plays an important part in addressing poverty and supporting economic development of Brazil 🧠 

   Mentoring can help people to understand how to make the most of their resources and build new knowledge, enabling them to increase their income and impact, which will have a direct influence on economic growth

Diego’s content recommendation is Benedict Evans’s essays 

You can watch the interview on YouTube here

Listen to the episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts

Thanks for reading,

Olga