Most of the startups that tried to fix Nigerian distribution are dead. The drinks trade never noticed.

African B2B commerce raised over $400 million to digitise the supply chain, and most of it is gone. Nigeria's $6 billion alcohol market kept running on key distributors and WhatsApp the whole time. Sippy thinks the survivors, not the casualties, wrote the playbook.

In February 2026, a Lagos court froze the assets of Alerzo, the Ibadan B2B retail startup that raised over $20 million and once claimed 100,000 retailers. Moniepoint was chasing ₦4.38 billion of a loan. Alerzo was selling its buses and motorcycles to pay it back.

Seven months later Twiga Foods, the Kenyan supply chain company that raised $185 million, entered administration. MarketForce had already shut RejaReja in 2024 after raising $40 million, citing "razor-thin margins" and a "race to the bottom" on price. Sabi, valued at $300 million in 2023, cut a fifth of its staff in 2025 and pivoted from FMCG to exporting minerals. Wasoko and MaxAB merged, shed three markets and quietly became a lender instead of a distributor.

On the consumer side it was the same story. Jumia Food closed in seven countries in December 2023, its CEO noting that anyone offering 30 percent off with free delivery "is losing money on every single order." Bolt Food left Nigeria the same month, and ChopNowNow closed in 2024 because, its founder said, "there is no loyalty in this market."

WeeTracker's post-mortem on the sector was blunt: asset-heavy B2B models suffer because the cost of the trucks and warehouses eats margins that were 2 to 5 percent to begin with. The drinks trade, meanwhile, carried on exactly as it had for decades.

A $6 billion market that runs on trust

Nigeria's alcoholic beverage market was worth $6.1 billion in 2021 on Euromonitor's count, up 32.6 percent in a single year. Beer takes about 55 percent of it, spirits 30, wine 15. The Spirits and Wine Association of Nigeria puts spirits alone near $2 billion, and estimates that 40 percent of the wine and spirits sold in the country are counterfeit or smuggled.

Demand is loud. Lagos's top 15 lounges took ₦4.32 billion in the five weeks of December 2024, with tables going for up to ₦1.2 million a night, and hotels took ₦54 billion in the same window. Supply is almost entirely invisible to software: BCG estimates small shops and open markets carry more than 97 percent of food, beverage and personal care sales in Nigeria, with modern retail expected to stay below 5 percent through 2030. Between the brewer and the bar sits a layered system of distributors built on relationships, credit extended on trust and orders placed by phone.

Even the multinationals struggled with it. Nigerian Breweries lost ₦144.8 billion in 2024 chiefly on foreign exchange, and Diageo sold its majority stake in Guinness Nigeria to Tolaram that same year for about $70 million, a stake now worth roughly $355 million. What kills a company here is rarely demand. It is the cost structure it carries to serve it.

The survivors look nothing like the casualties

Drinks.ng launched in 2013 and has raised just $100,000 of outside money in its life. It is still live, doing around 200 orders a day to 40,000 customers on revenue near ₦8 billion, and has pivoted toward wholesale and events. In 2015 its founder killed cash on delivery and free delivery, calling them "the two worst things that happened to e-commerce in Nigeria." Orders fell. Confirmed orders rose. Those same two subsidies, offered generously by everyone else, are what later buried Jumia Food and ChopNowNow.

OmniRetail took the opposite route from Alerzo. Rather than build its own trucks and warehouses, it sits on top of the distributor network that already exists, coordinating 5,800 distributors for 150,000 retailers. It was net-profitable in 2024, moves ₦1.3 trillion a year on about $38 million raised, and its most profitable line is the ₦19 billion a month it lends to the retailers who order through it. Chowdeck was profitable before its $9 million Series A and crossed a million orders a month, not by subsidising delivery but by charging for it and being faster than everyone who didn't.

The pattern across all three: own inventory only where margin can carry it, never subsidise the last mile, and build on top of existing distribution instead of trying to replace it with your own fleet.

Where Sippy sits

Sippy is small against those names. It has completed over 1,000 deliveries, moved over $500,000 in delivery value, and supplies more than 20 hotels, resorts, lounges and event businesses across Lagos, Abuja and Calabar, including Blakes Resort, Kintik Lounge and Kreeks Resort. Drinks.ng does more orders in a week than Sippy has done in total.

But Sippy grew out of the Uyi-Idahor family's own drinks business, not a pitch deck. "We were already the key distributor's customer and the lounge's supplier," says founder and CEO Aiseosa Uyi-Idahor. "We were doing everything the B2B startups wanted to digitise, by hand, for years before we wrote a line of code. We knew the margins before we tried to automate them."

That origin shapes three decisions that put Sippy closer to the survivors than the casualties. Category first: premium spirits, champagne and wine carry margins that can absorb the cost of holding stock, which is why Drinks.ng survived on its own inventory where FMCG players running on 2 to 5 percent could not, and when 40 percent of what's on the shelf is fake, a supplier a hotel bar can trust is selling the thing the trade has always paid for. Customer second: consumers can order, but the centre of gravity is the account, hotels and lounges get pricing, order history, delivery tracking and one-tap reordering, and the company measures itself on how often they come back. Software third: inventory, suppliers, accounts, deliveries and sales sit in one connected system, with AI flagging when an account is due to reorder, so a small team spends its time on the relationship instead of the admin.

"The drinks industry has always been built on trust," Uyi-Idahor says. "Technology shouldn't replace that trust. It should preserve it, strengthen it and make it easier to scale."

The last five years killed the idea that venture capital, trucks and steep discounts could buy their way into Nigerian distribution. They did not kill the market, which is still growing and still mostly analogue between manufacturer and bar. Sippy's bet is that a drinks-only, account-first, software-native version of the model the survivors landed on, run by people who grew up inside the trade rather than studying it, can go from three cities to the rest of the country without repeating the mistakes that are now, for several would-be predecessors, a matter of court record.