The good, the bad, and the ugly of launching a food delivery service in the Philippines

Philippine startup MetroPlate recently relaunched as an online food delivery service. The move came just a few months after MetroPlate started out as a service sending healthy food to workers in fast-paced, outsourced industries like call centers. The original idea was based on the fact that there were no other nutritious options available for these workers. The domestic business process outsourcing (BPO) industry employs about 750,000 people nationwide.

But the startup failed to click with its target audience. MetroPlate co-founder Jerome Ibanez explains, “We had a soft launch last year and tested our business model, but unfortunately it did not click due to a number of reasons – mostly relating to the budget of the customers and time constraints during their work-breaks.”

In the past month or so since Metroplate re-opened, Ibanez is back to testing its new direction, bringing with it all the attendant startup triumphs, struggles, and disasters.

This is the MetroPlate team. (L-R) Mitchell Cabuloy (developer), Kevin Olsson (developer), Ian Yapjuangco (co-founder), Jerome Ibanez (co-founder), Dunhill Velasquez (delivery personnel)

Small first steps

MetroPlate is as bare bones of a test as you can make for your business model. After the relaunch as a Foodpanda-style home food delivery site, the startup is very small in scale. It now delivers to only three condominiums in Manila from a mere six restaurants – 8065 Bagnet, Toribox, Zark’s Burgers, Rap’s Steaks and Cakes, Sinangag Express, and Starbucks – for a total of seven hours at the tail end of each day – from 6pm until 1am.

The technical foundation of the MetroPlate website was built by its American partner,
InstaNomz, which operates a similar service at Harvard University. InstaNomz provided Ibanez and his team with the code needed to create the key features of a food delivery website. The MetroPlate site allows users to browse food selections, place orders, and get delivery confirmation.

As far as ecommerce goes, the technology powering the MetroPlate site is not exactly treading new ground. The minimalism may not be completely all by design – the team has been hard pressed for time.

Ibanez explains, “We were finalizing almost all details on the day before our launch. We made sure that the website was working as expected and we also did some dry runs as to how our deliveries are going to go. We simulated scenarios like what to do when you have multiple orders, what to do when someone asks for a refund, and so on.”

Despite these preparations, this relaunch did not necessarily have fewer hiccups than the original launch last year. For example, to make more efficient use of their limited resources, they had originally planned to deliver only to the three condominiums that fell within a small radius of one another. However, according to Ibanez, “A lot of people have been asking us to deliver to other condos and even to other places that are not condos, such as computer shops.”

The problem is not necessarily one of distance, Ibanez says. “The places are quite close actually, but the problem lies with training our delivery guy. Right now, we only have one and so we are slowly introducing him to new delivery spots.”

The official numbers show just how far MetroPlate has evolved from its original plan. “When we check our orders, most of them come from condos that were not originally included in our list,” he explains.

Ibanez thus considers it a mistake to have initially limited delivery to only three condos. As a result, he advises startups, “It’s good to focus on a small portion of your customers at first but prepare to adjust just in case it doesn’t work.”

Focusing on service

Tweaking the business model