Grab to integrate food delivery into its main app

Grab will fully integrate its food-delivery services into its main app and discontinue the separate GrabFood app.

This will bring the company’s Malaysian and Singaporean food-delivery platforms in line with those in other countries, where Grab has a unified app.

Photo credit: Grab

Lim Kell Jay, head of Grab Singapore, told The Business Times that the merger will be completed within the first half of this year.

Lim said that offering both transport and food delivery alongside other options in a single app will open up greater distance between Grab and its main rivals in both spaces.

“For the merchants, the biggest proposition is our customer base,” he told the Times. “We have been working hard to build a customer base that’s actively transacting on our main app. Now it’s about providing this food-delivery service to them, so that we direct more business to our merchants. This is something that the other players aren’t able to do.”

A Grab spokesperson confirmed to Tech in Asia that the integration of GrabFood into the main Grab app will take place by June.

Malaysia and Singapore’s standalone GrabFood apps are a holdover from Uber’s UberEats service, which was present in both countries prior to being acquired by Grab early last year, the spokesperson explained.

“Following the Grab-Uber transaction, our priority was to ensure a smooth transition for our customers,” they said. “In Singapore and Malaysia, consumers were used to the UberEats model where the food-delivery app was a standalone mobile app. With our refreshed mobile interface launched in July last year, and increasing organic conversion of transport users to food, we believe it is time to bring GrabFood back into the main app.”

Grab will add more tiles in its main app in the coming months, “such as ‘Travel,’ ‘Healthcare,’ ‘Insurance,’ and more,” the spokesperson added. “With one app and one mobile wallet, and a consistent user experience across eight countries […] consumers can access, pay, and earn loyalty points for the most highly-used consumer services anywhere they go in Southeast Asia.”

See: After 10x growth last year, food delivery will be Grab’s main battlefront in 2019

Rival ride-hailing giant Go-Jek launched in Singapore last November. It’s only offering private car transportation at the moment, with no indication if its Go-Food service could follow.

In Go-Jek’s native Indonesia, Go-Food and GrabFood are locked in fierce competition. A recent survey of Indonesian stay-at-home diners by consulting firm Spire found that 35 percent of respondents used Go-Food most frequently for their food delivery needs, compared to 27 percent who normally opt for GrabFood.

However, since January 2018 Grab claims that GrabFood’s orders in the country have grown 6x, while the number of Indonesian food merchants on its platform has increased 8x.