First-of-its-kind grocery delivery platform is a welcome solution for busy lifestyles

When I landed in Qatar in 2015, pursuing a banking career, I had little time to spare for daily errands, and grocery shopping was a particular chore I really wanted to avoid. I soon realized that many others shared the same pain and thus, Suncart was first conceptualized.

Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, I decided to draw on my experience in banking and combine it with a passion for technology, to start a new venture that has since become Qatar’s leading online grocery delivery service.

Incubated at Qatar Science and Technology (QSTP), part of Qatar Foundation Research, Development, and Innovation, Suncart got an amazing platform to kickstart its journey. We were attracted to QSTP’s Free Zone which encouraged foreign ownership and was already fostering a vibrant culture of entrepreneurship in Qatar and the region.

As part of our incubation, we were provided ready-to-occupy workspaces for two years, where we were able to engage and network with other startup founders operating within Qatar Foundation. By creating an environment where like-minded entrepreneurs can interact and exchange knowledge, QSTP empowered our company along with numerous other early-stage startup founders and employees to address common challenges, and keep progressing.

A major challenge for Suncart was convincing leading grocery chains to work with a startup that had no established brand name or presence as yet. Through extensive market research and leveraging our networks, we were able to partner with one of the largest grocery chains in Qatar.

Today, Suncart features over 10,000 grocery items on its mobile apps and serves thousands of customers from Umm Salal to Wakra. It has become one of the highest-rated grocery delivery services in Qatar, with an average order rating of 4.5 out of 5.
Going forward, we plan on expanding our services into other cities within the region too. Our vision, simply put, is to spare people the hassles as well as the physical and mental-load of full-basket grocery shopping.

Our expansion journey will present its own set of challenges, though we will keep leveraging our current learnings and networks for our next phase of growth. We believe that ambition and perseverance is critical for any entrepreneur, and QSTP has successfully built a robust innovation and entrepreneurial environment to develop and apply such traits.

Khawaja Jaffer Abbas
Founder & CEO of Suncart