September the 7th, 2025 – The popular food delivery service, Bolt Food, is set to pull out of Croatia, referring to it as a “difficult decision” to have made.
As Sinisa Malus/Poslovni Dnevnik writes, Bolt Food is withdrawing from the Croatian market for business reasons. Ordering food through the application will be possible until October the 6th, after which it will end its operations in Croatia.
“We have currently decided that we will not continue with Bolt Food operations in Croatia for business reasons. This means that our users will not be able to order through our Bolt Food food delivery application from October the 6th, 2025. Bolt operates on the principle of efficiency and prudence, which sometimes implies difficult decisions that improve the company’s business in the long term,” they emphasised from Bolt.
They have also informed their delivery partners, restaurants and retail partners about their recent decision to stop operating in Croatia. They noted that Bolt does not employ actually delivery partners, but rather provides a platform that connects delivery partners with users, with delivery partners in most cases employing partner companies (so-called aggregators/fleets).
“If delivery partners and fleet owners want to continue working with us, they can provide transportation services through the Bolt platform. In this way, they will still have the opportunity to generate income with Bolt even after the cessation of Bolt Food’s operations in Croatia,” they said.
They also pointed out that Bolt continues to operate the transportation application in Croatia, providing on-demand ride-hailing and electric scooter rental services, in which they are, they say, the market leader. Bolt Food’s financial indicators differed from the picture provided by the food delivery sector in Croatia. Their revenue almost halved in 2023 – from 4.43 million euros in 2022, they fell to 2.22 million.
One year later, they recorded a slight recovery in Croatia to 2.7 million euros. Despite this, as well as the fact that they are the weakest of three such applications operating in Croatia in terms of market share, they recorded a positive result: a profit of 93,000 euros in 2023, which increased to 118,000 in 2024. Bolt Food arrived in Croatia back in May 2020, at a time when demand for food delivery had increased sharply due to the coronavirus pandemic. They first started in the City of Zagreb, in December 2021, the service expanded to Osijek. By the summer of 2022, they had also arrived and set up operations in Split. In those three cities, they collaborated with more than 600 different restaurants.
As time went on, they ended up covering other cities – Rijeka, Zadar, Šibenik, Dubrovnik, Pula and Karlovac – introducing a grocery delivery service called Bolt Market. The application had the same business model as competitors like Wolt and Glovo, in that restaurants paid a commission for food purchased through the application, customers paid for the delivery, and the delivery people were not Bolt employees but “partners.”
It’s also worth noting that Bolt Food has already left some significant markets in previous years, and it isn’t just Croatia facing withdrawal. For example, back at the end of 2023, they withdrew from Nigeria, where they had been present since 2021. This was apparently due to rising fuel prices. They also ceased operations in South Africa, where they had arrived back in 2020. In both markets, they were under pressure from similar domestic services, as well as from other global players such as Uber Eats and Glovo. Bolt’s total revenue last year otherwise amounted to almost two billion euros.
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