Modern Transport Award to Karl Munthe-Kaas
WORTHY WINNER: As the founder of Norway’s most successful digital grocery store, Karl Alveng Munthe-Kaas (38) has built up a logistics-intensive billion-dollar company. He is this year’s winner of the Modern Transport award.
The Modern Transport Prize was awarded for the first time in 1969, and according to the regulations, must go to «one or more who have excelled in the fields of logistics and transport in particular». This year’s winner is thus CEO and founder of Oda, formerly Kolonial.no, Karl Alveng Munthe-Kaas.
«Munthe-Kaas is behind a company that has carried out groundbreaking work in the grocery trade, and challenged the established grocery giants. During the corona pandemic, the company managed to resolve the situation for the best, scaled up and doubled its turnover from 2019 to 2020 without compromising the delivery quality “, the jury’s reasoning states.
Further ambitions
The jury has also emphasized that Oda and Munthe-Kaas still have great ambitions. This year, Kolonial.no changed its name to Oda, to look into an expansion abroad – and Finland and Germany are the first countries to be visited by Oda.
Extra impressive is how Oda has chosen to create its own systems to make the logistics move. IT systems such as WMS, route optimization and picking solution are all created by Oda itself.
Munthe-Kaas has a degree in social economics from LSE and has studied social economics at the University of Oslo. He has been a business developer at Finn and at Schibsted, and a consultant at McKinsey. He also helped start the car-sharing service Nabobil.
Among colleagues, he describes as «extremely smart» and «very good at solving problems». A comparison used as “Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, but with great empathy”.
At 38 years old, Munthe-Kaas is also the youngest ever winner of the Modern Transport Award.
Inn and jury
As a winner, you will also automatically join next year’s jury. In this year’s jury, last year’s winner Inger Beate Hovi, head of research at the Department of Transport Economics sits with three permanent members: Associate Professor at BI, Eirill Bø who is the head of the jury, logistics director at Matmegleren and former board chairman at Logistikkforeningen Lars Inge Fenes and harbor director at Drammen Havn, Einar Olsen. MT editor Øyvind Ludt acts as the jury’s secretary. Next year, Inger Beate Hovi will be part of the jury.
There are many worthy winners out there, and the MT editorial staff has received several entries for this year’s award. If you have good suggestions for who are current candidates for next year’s award, just contact the editor at [email protected].