Fesgas partners with 7Krave for free delivery of cooking gas
Published:Sunday | September 29, 2024 | 12:06 AMNeville Graham - Business Reporter
Petroleum marketing company Future Energy Source Company, which trades as Fesco, is partnering with delivery service 7Krave, through the 7Kravemart app, to deliver Fesgas household cooking gas to customers.
Fesco CEO Jeremy Barnes says the service will operate via the 7Kravemart app, covering a range of cylinder sizes, from 11 kilogrammes to 45 kg.
“Customers will have access to a variety of Fesgas products, including new installations and cylinder exchanges for the range of cylinders that we offer,” Barnes told the Financial Gleaner after the company signed the working agreement with 7Krave.
“Whether they currently use Fesgas or another brand, customers can seamlessly initiate exchanging their cooking gas cylinders for a Fesgas product online using the 7Kravemart app” he said.
Delivery will be free, and the gas will carry the same price tags as that of local retailer, Barnes said. As the latest market entrant in a competitive space that includes IGL, GasPro and Petcom, Fesgas’ cylinders are typically cheaper than the competition. Its offerings include a 12.5 kg fibreglass/PVC composite cylinder that’s pitched at apartment dwellers, food vendors, and outdoor enthusiasts as fire-resistant and explosion-proof.
Since its launch in 2015, 7Krave has been one of the central companies that transformed the food delivery market in Jamaica, a sector that really came into its own during the pandemic.
7Krave’s customers are connected with local restaurants through a user-friendly app. The delivery service, which started out in Kingston, has since expanded to other parts of the country. The 7Kravemart app is a recent addition through which customers can order groceries delivered to their door.
The partnership with Fesco takes the online platform one step further into the industrial space. The service will first roll out in Kingston and St Andrew, with plans to expand to St Catherine and other regions as demand grows. Both companies see this as the beginning of a long-term partnership, with plans to expand the product range available on 7Kravemart and introducing innovations.
Business development and marketing specialist at Fesco, Stephan Ebanks, was hired by the petroleum marketing company in May to marshal the marketing efforts of Fesgas. Ebanks said that from his assessment, what differentiated domestic cooking gas brands was not only the look and feel of their products, but also how they accessed the market.
“In order to be a better player, to get more market share, we needed to have an e-commerce [portal] or an ecosystem where the customers could access their product in a seamless way,” Ebanks said.
He said such an ecosystem would have to facilitate online payments and eliminate pressure points, such as having to do in-person payments or not having card machines to facilitate transactions. Ebanks said the idea came together when he found that “last mile” companies like QuickCart, 7Krave, Cutdiline and some others were either moving packages or moving products to ultimate users.
“7Krave is the only one that I saw who was doing something apart from food, in that they’re doing groceries, they’re building out warehousing for logistics purposes, and so on,” Ebanks noted, adding that 7Krave was better suited to achieve what Fesgas wanted, with the ability to access their captive audience.
“They (the customers) are already spending in a very rhythmic frequency. Some people buy two or three times a week. Some buy the entire month of groceries. So it was the perfect place to position our product for consumption,” Ebanks observed.
He said that when he approached the 7Krave team about the potential relationship, they hadn’t figured out how to pull it off, so a joint team spent at least two months making changes to the 7Krave system to accommodate selling products outside of groceries, since it now involved logistics that had to be sorted out between the two companies.
7Krave CEO Rory White said the partnership lines up with efforts to enhance its services. The 7Kravemart app allowed for an even better match with the objectives of the gas company, he noted, since the same demographic that would utilise the grocery delivery service would naturally gravitate to buying cooking gas.
“By adding cooking gas to 7Kravemart, we’re giving Jamaicans another essential service at their fingertips. This is just the start of what we aim to accomplish as we continue expanding and innovating to meet the evolving needs of our customers,” White told the Financial Gleaner.
“That same demographic using online services to buy food would naturally want a service that offers something to cook it. The same app that you would use to buy your groceries would be the same app that you would use to buy gas ... and it arrives in half an hour or so, in the same way,” White said.
Barnes says a surprising number of persons in ordinary households actually use the services of the likes of 7Krave and others. It suggests, he said, that there is a ready market that spans multiple demographics that will utilise the online service. He called to mind the experience of his own household worker.
“She tells me that, very often, four or five persons in her area will pool together and order KFC through 7Krave. Where they live is not uptown, it’s more in the inner city, and they swear by the service, since they no longer have to pay a taxi to go to the KFC location and then pay a taxi to get back home,” Barnes said.
That’s the same level of convenience Fesgas wants to engender for cooking gas, he indicated.