Fuse Network's Peepl Receives £700k Investment to Develop a Community-driven Food Delivery Alternative for Liverpool City Region Restaurants
In an announcement made today, Steve Rotheram, Metro Mayor of the Liverpool City Region unveiled a £700k investment in Peepl, a Fuse Network-powered innovative payments and rewards technology that enables local restaurants an alternative to the existing food delivery behemoths such as Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and Just Eat.
Providing an Alternative to Restaurants
Specifically, the Combined Authority’s £700k funding for Peepl comprises £500k to fund the team at Peepl and infrastructure while the remaining £200k is dedicated to funding ‘kickstarter’ grants direct to restaurants to help them offer incentivized offers to customers.
Peepl is a newly-launched application with a community-oriented and ethical approach to the food delivery business. Notably, Peepl seeks to connect a local, low-carbon delivery solution via partner apps with local restaurants and customers. Peepl’s business model will help restaurants pay lower fees via a reward token that enables more money to flow into the local community.
Peepl’s vision largely stems from the hardships faced by restaurants during the pandemic-induced lockdowns. At the time, most restaurants turned to offer takeaways via the leading food delivery platforms. However, this proved to be a big menace as restaurants can sometimes be forced to pay as much as 37.5% commission on each takeaway order placed by customers.
Peepl and its partner’s technology aims to solve the aforementioned problem faced by restaurants by charging 50% fewer fees for the same service as offered by the likes of Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and others.
Specifically, Peepl allows the creation and use of a localized currency called ‘Peepl Tokens’ that change hands between sellers and buyers in the network. In our case, it would be restaurants and customers placing the orders.
Notably, the tokens can only be spent within the network to ensure the circulating money supply is within the city region’s economy.
As a reward for using its tokens, Peepl is offering its customers as much as 5-10% of the total price of their order as a reward in the form of PPL tokens. These tokens can not only be used to pay for other services in the Peepl network but will also remain locked within the network for a minimum of 4-5 years.
Peepl Enabling Low-Carbon Delivery
It is worthy of note that Peepl is committed to minimizing its carbon footprint and, as such, will leverage six low-carbon logistics hubs in each of the six city region local authority areas to execute delivery operations through Agile Liverpool.
At present, Agile operates in Liverpool and employs its drivers on an FTE basis and will train and upskill new recruits via the Kickstart Scheme.
Commenting on the development, Steve Rotheram, Metro Mayor of the Liverpool City Region, said:
“In the Liverpool City Region, we aren’t the sort to simply follow the crowd. We like to be disrupters; to chart our own course and take great pride in our local businesses and community solidarity.”
Adding:
“Peepl has the potential to radically disrupt the food delivery market by bringing together all those values and injecting a lot more fairness – for riders and restaurants alike – to an industry not known for its treatment of workers.”
Similar sentiments were echoed by Leon Rossiter, Co-founder, and CEO of Peepl. Rossiter said:
“The big delivery apps, alongside ride hailing platforms, extract large amounts of value from each transaction that takes place between people that live and work in the same city. I think most people are waking up to the fact that it doesn’t need to be this way. Advances in blockchain technology, alongside shifting values and laws, mean new business models are possible for the internet, and the local economies we all live in.”
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