Chowdeck, one of West Africa’s fastest-growing food delivery platforms, announced that it recorded its strongest performance to date during this year’s Black Friday campaign, processing more than 183,000 orders across Nigeria and Ghana and setting a new company record of 52,000 orders in a single day.
The company had entered the weekend with what insiders described as an “aggressive but achievable” internal target: 50,000 orders on launch day. It was nearly double its numbers from the previous year. But the bigger story was how the company chose to pursue it — by letting the public watch everything unfold in real time.
Real-Time Transparency Becomes the Star of the Campaign
In the days leading up to Black Friday, Chowdeck launched a public-facing live tracker, an online dashboard that displayed activity across the platform as orders rolled in. The tracker included metrics such as app visits, total transaction value processed, rider kilometres, delivery speeds, and peak order loads.
It quickly became the centrepiece of the campaign.
The company also embedded an interactive puzzle inside the tracker. What began as a small experimental feature soon drove widespread engagement, with customers competing to solve it in the shortest time possible. One user reportedly cracked it in under six seconds, contributing to a surge of 2.5 million app visits across the weekend.
The unusual approach effectively turned Chowdeck’s internal operational stress test into a public spectacle, attracting observers, customers, and vendors who refreshed the dashboard to monitor progress as the numbers climbed.
A Record-Breaking Weekend by the Numbers
Data released by Chowdeck after the event shows the scale of activity:
- ₦1.4 billion total transaction volume processed
- 183,000+ orders delivered across both countries
- 52,000+ orders on Friday alone
- Peak load reaching 115 orders per minute
- 5,000+ orders per hour, maintained for five consecutive hours
- 727,000 kilometres covered by riders
- One rider earning ₦205,000 during the period
- Fastest recorded delivery time: 1 minute 30 seconds
Restaurant partners also reported significant spikes. Major chains such as Chicken Republic, along with hundreds of smaller vendors, achieved their highest-ever single-day volumes on the platform.
System Stability Under Pressure
Perhaps the most notable outcome was infrastructural. Despite the heavy surge in demand — which typically overwhelms digital platforms during major sales events in the region — Chowdeck maintained platform stability throughout the campaign.
There were no major crashes, service disruptions, or widespread delays. Company engineers described the weekend as a “stress test passed under real-world pressure.”
The results suggest that Chowdeck’s backend logistics and fulfillment systems, including routing, batching, and partner coordination, have reached a level of maturity that positions the startup competitively within the increasingly crowded West African delivery market.
A Community Effort
Beyond the numbers, the company says the campaign demonstrated the power of community participation. Customers shared screenshots of order spikes, tracked hourly progress, and exchanged puzzle solutions — turning what could have been a routine sales push into a shared online event.
Chowdeck executives say the experiment validated a simple thesis: that transparency, coupled with reliable infrastructure, can transform customer behaviour and deepen trust in an industry where delays and system failures are often taken for granted.
As the company prepares for next year’s cycle, the question now is not whether it can scale — but how far its operational model can stretch during peak national moments.
