HungryGoWhere enters meal delivery via FoodPanda. A match made in food heaven?

HungryGoWhere CEO Frank Young. Photo credit: HungryGoWhere.

Singapore’s food delivery market doesn’t seem like the most inviting one to enter. Sure, Singaporeans love good food. But the Lion City remains a small market of about 5.4 million people. Between the likes of FoodPanda, Deliveroo, UberEats, and local players like Grain, the market appears quite locked down.

Together with FoodPanda’s restaurants, HungryGoWhere will offer more than 2,000 options to users.

Singaporean restaurant discovery website HungryGoWhere thinks it can make a difference there, however. The company announced today it has partnered with food delivery firm FoodPanda to add online food ordering and delivery to its list of services. It’s also starting a takeaway service, where a user can order online at a restaurant ahead of time, then swing by the place and pick up their food.

As one of Singapore’s startup success stories, HungryGoWhere might just be in a good position to do it. HungryGoWhere currently has over 1 million unique monthly visitors and over 5 million page views. According to SimilarWeb, it gets more traction than competitors like European startup Quandoo and local and regional players Burpple, Eatigo, and Offpeak.

In FoodPanda, it saw a partner of “comparable clout,” HungryGoWhere CEO Frank Young explains. The company’s established delivery network and domain expertise made it a good fit for HungryGoWhere’s venture into this new space.

Founded in 2004, HungryGoWhere was acquired in 2012 by SingTel Digital Media (a subsidiary of telco SingTel).

“We are working toward being the portal that fully satisfies your food cravings,” says Frank, who joined the company early last year.

Long reach

Frank reasons that if consumers are looking for food recommendations online, it’s important to service that need immediately. Besides actually booking a table at a restaurant and going there, today’s consumers want online ordering and delivery. So why send them to different websites to do it?

HungryGoWhere has worked for the past three months to integrate FoodPanda’s data and delivery tech into its own platform, enabling users to order and pay on HungryGoWhere. A FoodPanda delivery person picks up the order and brings it over.

Adjusting HungryGoWhere’s tech to allow for these extra features wasn’t too much of a challenge – the current platform could accommodate them with some tailoring. The team added an ordering system and a payment platform and it was good to go, Frank says.

See: HungryGoWhere still going places after acquisition, says inSing CEO

The business partnership between HungryGoWhere and FoodPanda doesn’t involve an investment from one side into the other, Frank confirms.

“With these four aspects of our brand – discovery, reservations, delivery, and takeaway – we believe we fulfill the full needs of the consumer,” says Frank.

Seat at the table