Food fight: New challengers spice up Singapore’s online grocery war

The startup’s founders (L-R): head of products Isaac Tay, CEO Joel Sng, and Singapore country manager Jonathan Low. Photo credit: Honestbee.

At a cramped office in Singapore’s Little India, journalists awaited the unveiling of Honestbee, a new grocery shopping site. The space was already sardined with the startup’s fast expanding team, which ballooned from a handful to 55 in just a few months. Some staff vacated the room to accommodate the curious outsiders.

The live demo was unpolished but charming. Jonathan Low, the tall and bespectacled co-founder of Honestbee, received a staged phone call from a delivery guy confirming his order.

He explained what Honestbee is: an Instacart-like service which assigns a freelance runner to buy groceries on your behalf from the nearest supermarket. The items are then sent straight to you. Everyone guessed that a delivery man would show up at the door.

“Delivery takes time, so let’s wait a little bit,” he said, breaking the awkward silence. The knock finally came.

“Now, I wonder who that is?” He asked, relieved. The runner entered with two full bags.

Honestbee is the latest entrant in Singapore’s online grocery battle, and it’s eager to prove it can deliver the goods. Casual observers probably won’t spot many differences between the service and its competitors, which now include RedMart, PurelyFresh, and GoFresh. Even supermarkets like Cold Storage are upping the ante with a revamped online shopping site.

Indeed, they all seem to work the same way, as I found out after trying Honestbee one weekend. After entering your postal code, the site tells you what merchants are available in the area. You then select one of its partners – from supermarkets like Cold Storage and Sheng Siong to smaller setups like Pet Lovers Centre and Gastronomia.

Next comes putting items in your shopping cart, picking a time slot, and checking out. The service waives delivery fees for basket sizes above a certain amount. And, if all goes well – and it usually does – the delivery guy rings your doorbell at the appointed time.

So far so good. But where Honestbee really shines is its promise of delivering groceries to you within an hour. Well, more like two hours, as the case was for me. I made my purchase at 11.30am, and the earliest time slot I could choose was 1pm to 2pm. One-hour ranges are the best anyone can do in Singapore now, though Honestbee wants to eventually introduce 30-minute slots.

The startup is part of a rising class of “on-demand” services that aims to give you what you want, as soon as you want it. Uber pioneered the idea of using existing resources (idle private vehicles) and summoning them to anyone through an app. Instacart takes the same concept to groceries, and Honestbee applies the same model to Singapore.

Joel Sng, the enigmatic backer and CEO of Honestbee, has committed to funding the company through to the end of 2016. When a journalist prodded him on how he amassed enough cash to invest, Sng didn’t say. But the Harvard graduate was notably an investor in startups like Facebook, Uber, Palantir, and Airbnb. Sng then returned to Singapore initially to run his family office. He didn’t divulge how much he’s investing in the company, except to say that “you can’t do this business with six figures.”

His pensiveness contrasts with the eclectic, splashy decor of the office, which includes rows of cinema seats, a charming cafe, and a huge pop art piece originally commissioned for a bank by an artist called Steve Lawler. Lifeopp, a LinkedIn for service workers, was Honestbee’s previous reincarnation. While Lifeopp didn’t work out, it shares one common trait with the online groceries site – a social mission of providing employment to blue collar workers.

“We could’ve chosen to sell flowers or durians. Or car tires. As long as we’re able to build a highly retentive audience, as long as we’re able to grow our customer base and get them to come back frequently, we can provide the masses with quite a lot of income opportunities. And that’s the reason we started this,” said Sng.