Rappi's Shift to Hub-and-Spoke

Rappi is moving from being just a matching app into being a physical retail and food network. In the old model, each order starts at a different store and a courier makes one custom trip. With dark kitchens and micro fulfillment centers, Rappi can place popular supply in fixed nodes, batch nearby orders, shorten pickup time, and turn more of each delivery fee and merchant commission into margin.

• The dark kitchens are not mainly about launching Rappi owned restaurant brands. They are infrastructure for existing restaurant partners, giving strong sellers extra kitchen capacity in neighborhoods with demand, without forcing them to open a full storefront. That makes Rappi more useful to merchants and gives it more control over prep, packaging, and dispatch.
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• The economics improve when couriers can stack stops. In a pure point to point model, one rider often handles one pickup and one drop. In a hub and spoke model, riders can leave from one node with multiple orders on similar routes, closer to Domino's or dark store logistics. Across online grocery, higher drops per trip is one of the clearest ways to lower delivery cost per order.
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• This fits Rappi's broader super app strategy. More than 90% of customers buy from at least two categories, and order frequency rises over time, so owning fulfillment nodes for food and convenience helps serve the same user across more use cases. The closest parallel is Meituan and, more recently, Swiggy, both of which used dense local logistics to expand beyond restaurant delivery.
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The next step is for these nodes to become shared infrastructure across meals, groceries, and convenience goods. As density rises, Rappi can route more orders through owned or controlled hubs, improve delivery times, and widen the gap between a multi category network and single vertical rivals that still depend mostly on dispersed merchant locations.