Dubai, United Arab Emirates: Chandan Mittal, the former Swiggy General Manager Supply Chain, has joined grocery delivery service Yalla!Market as Chief Operations Officer in March 2022.

Chandan stepped in the new role with 18 years of experience with leading brands in Q-commerce, Cloud Kitchen & Quick Service Restaurant industries. Among them are Swiggy, Costa Coffee, Café Coffee Day & Mad Over Donuts.

Chandan’s last assignment was with Swiggy where he was instrumental in setting up Q-Commerce (Quick Grocery Delivery Service “InstaMart”) & Swiggy Cloud Kitchen Vertical. Core contributions at Swiggy were to build & operate a supply chain network of warehouses with a total area of 1.4 million square feet spread across 8 cities and operating & expanding a network of 80 Cloud kitchens across different locations.

In previous roles with Costa Coffee, Café Coffee Day & Mad Over Donuts Chandan has been a Regional Business Head.

In his new role, Mittal will be in charge of all service operations in Yalla!Market, including the supply chain, operational flow, launching new dark stores, and scaling business across the MENA market.

“When we started Yalla!Market in Dubai, we lacked operations management experience. The moment we met Chandan, it was a match. His talents and experience will be invaluable as we accelerate our expansion in the MENA market and plan to enter Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Chandan's long story of leadership, coupled with his wide background in cloud kitchen systems and grocery delivery, makes him an ideal person for this position” — said CEO of Yalla!Market Leo Dovbenko.

As of June 2022 Yalla!Market delivers up to 22,000 orders per month and since 2022 the mobile app has already been downloaded 170,000 times.

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About Yalla!Market

Yalla!Market delivers high-quality groceries and other goods of daily demand to the doorstep in Dubai. The service operates through dark stores[1] located in seven areas of Dubai.

The client receives an order in just 15 minutes from the nearest dark store due to a hyperlocal delivery area concept and extremely high picking speed. A special layout of goods combined with the dark store’s inaccessibility for the customers allows the pickers to collect the order in just 3 minutes after the purchase. As stores are located in residential areas with high-density neighborhoods couriers are able to deliver several orders per ride.

Yalla!Market assortment includes more than 2800 SKU including  fresh meat and fish, wellness products, dairy, fresh flowers, and pharmacy.

The startup was founded by a team of Dubai-based entrepreneurs with a huge foodtech background and raised $4.5M from Wamda Capital, Doha tech Angels, Fry One Ventures and Dubai Angel Investors.

[1] Dark store — is a room where goods are stored and orders are collected for online stores. The dark store looks like an ordinary shopping room of a large supermarket, it is made “dark” by inaccessibility for customers - only employees can enter there. All rows and shelves in the dark store are numbered and the goods are arranged according to the principle "from heavy to light" - first the picker walks through the rows with five-liter bottles of water, gradually comes to the bags with spices and puts the last item in the cart in front of the packing area. When the collector places something in the box, he or she scans the barcode and the availability information is updated instantly.