Foodpanda: Rocket Internet’s Play At Food Delivery in Asia

Foodpanda co-founder Kiren Tanna

Rocket Internet’s online food delivery website, Foodpanda, was launched last year in April and has since undergone rapid expansion. Today, Rocket Internet’s FoodPanda is in eight Asian countries supported by 150 staff. Foodpanda, combined with Hellofood which is a food delivery site targeted at non-Asian markets, is serving over 10,000 restaurants. Foodpanda alone has around 5,000 restaurants.

Foodpanda co-founder Kiren Tanna (pictured), claims that all nine markets are growing and growth has been especially great for Pakistan, India, and Indonesia. In India, Foodpanda is working with over 2,000 restaurants. Interestingly, Kiren shared that India has a lot of orders from iPads over the weekend. For Pakistan, around 60 to 70 percent of the orders come from mobile. Singapore is a big dinner market while Indonesia and Taiwan prefer to order during lunch time.

Foodpanda works like this: customers go to the website and place orders online, then the restaurants will receive an order slip from Foodpanda’s GPRS box (or through SMS/email/fax), prepare the orders, and deliver them to the customers’ doorstep.

Foodpanda GPRS box

In places like Indonesia where food orders can be done by text or phone without the need of such a platform, I asked how Foodpanda differentiates itself. Kiren explained that the experience ordering food through the phone isn’t ideal. There’s a higher rate of errors when communicating information on the phone. Plus, expats who don’t speak the local language wouldn’t be able to place an order. With Foodpanda, it remembers customers’ delivery information when they next place an order, minimizes errors in communication since information is digitized, and ensures the most updated menus and prices available.

Although food orders are mostly done online, Foodpanda occasionally accepts phone orders to help new users get started. In such cases, the login details are sent to first time users together with discount perks to encourage them to order online in the future.

When asked about how Foodpanda selects restaurants to work with, Kiren told me:

We find the [restaurant] leads based on what we see [online], for example, HungryGoWhere. When we signed up a restaurant, we asked them questions like how many deliveries do you do? Are you ready for weekend peak capacity?

Foodpanda also orders from new restaurants to ensure that the food delivery experience is good and the food is in a good state when they are delivered. Orders from Foodpanda, though great, can be stressful for restaurants. Kiren shared that there are cases whereby a company flooded one store by ordering 200 sandwiches and another ordered 120 lunch boxes!

Moving forward, Foodpanda is looking to integrate with the big restaurants’ points-of-sale (POS) to make the process from ordering to billing smoother. Foodpanda is also investing heavily in mobile as it sees “very good traction” and growing number of orders from mobile devices. Kiren added: