Agriculture & Food

The pandemic that swept the world in 2020 has brought severe damage to many industries, but in the Southeast Asian market, the food delivery industry has been driven by the pandemic and its development has accelerated rapidly. Among them, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore are the three largest markets. Grab, GoJek, Foodpanda, etc. are all leaders in the region's industry. Shopee entered the Indonesian takeaway market as early as last year and launched the ShopeeFood page on the e-commerce platform. In January of this year, ShopeeFood also released a Jakarta rider recruitment announcement on social media.

Although the Southeast Asian food delivery market is growing at a significant rate, there is still a big gap in overall scale compared with China and the United States, which means that if new players enter, there is still a lot of hope in this field. Chinatown Takeaway, which focuses on providing high-quality and delicious Chinese food to local users in Southeast Asia, is such a new player.

1. Southeast Asia’s takeaway market is on the verge, and the demand for Chinese food is far from being met

"The dining habits of overseas Chinese are relatively uniform. Whether it is Singaporean Chinese, Vietnamese Chinese, or Thai Chinese, the dining habits and standards are quite similar to those in China, and are affected by the common influence of Chinese cuisine. For example, Sichuan and Hunan cuisines and Northeast China are very popular in China. Food is also very popular among Chinese users in Southeast Asia. It can be said that Chinese food delivery is an Internet business that is relatively easy to quickly replicate in Southeast Asia and other countries around the world,” said Tian Ye, founder of Chinatown Food Delivery.

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Tian Ye, founder and CEO of Chinatown Food

In 2019, Tian Ye, a serial entrepreneur who has been in Singapore for many years, founded Chinatown Takeaway. For him, the original intention of starting a business is actually very pure-to provide Chinese food takeaway with similar experience to domestic and foreign sellers for the new immigrant Chinese friends around him. Although the competition in Singapore’s food delivery market seems quite fierce. There are food delivery giants such as Grab and FoodPanda, as well as other Chinese food delivery platforms that have been online for many years. However, in the face of a large overseas Chinese population, Tian Ye found that Chinatown food delivery, which focuses on Chinese food delivery, is overseas. Have huge room for development. The subsequent growth performance of Chinatown food delivery proves the strong demand for overseas Chinese food delivery.

Thanks to the fission promotion of user groups, the self-developed logistics intelligent system and the relatively high customer unit price, Chinatown Takeaway has grown to more than 100,000 members and nearly 400 merchants within one year of its launch in Singapore. In the case where the merchant’s rake is lower than the industry’s leading platform’s commission (compared to the 30% commission of the industry’s leading platform, the commission ratio of Chinatown food delivery is only around 25%), Chinatown food delivery will be in 2020 It has achieved profitability in the local market and has become one of the preferred Chinese food platforms for many users. Due to the wide range of influence of Chinese food culture, Chinatown takeaway not only covers the Chinese community, even Indians and Europeans and Americans have become its platform users, accounting for 7%-8%.

More importantly, the 2020 epidemic has brought the Southeast Asian food delivery industry to the forefront, and Chinatown food delivery has also achieved further growth. According to Tian Ye, due to the surge in consumer demand for delivery during the epidemic, catering merchants also pay more attention to online delivery services. Merchants and platforms hire more riders than usual, and the number of delivery orders and service quality have been significantly improved. From only a dozen orders a day at the beginning of Chinatown food delivery to hundreds of orders a day during the implementation of social blocking measures in Singapore, in 2020 alone, a high growth rate of more than ten times has been achieved. During the same period, in order to help some merchants who had difficulty operating during the epidemic, Chinatown Food Delivery also provided additional platform subsidies, merchant live broadcasts, group purchases and other services to help them tide over the difficulties. Since last Sunday (May 16), Singapore has banned all restaurants from providing dine-in services, and can only take out and take-out. The number of take-out orders in Chinatown has increased by more than 200 orders a day.

2. Feel the social attributes from the mouth, user experience is the first

Serving people with unique needs in a multicultural society, Chinatown food delivery faces different challenges from mainstream food delivery platforms.

Tian Ye first mentioned a unique feature of Chinese food delivery. "Compared with other catering, the preparation time of Chinese food is longer. After placing an order, customers often have to wait for more than an hour to get the food. 20 minutes, but users will complain about the platform." In order to meet the needs of merchants, riders, and customers at the same time, and to ensure the taste of Chinese food delivery, Chinatown Food Delivery has done a lot of system development in this regard. Optimization of user notification algorithm. For example, on the platform side, merchants can set normal meal preparation time and peak meal preparation time, and the system will arrange riders to pick it up on time accordingly. At the same time, customers will also pay attention to the merchant’s meal preparation time before ordering to avoid excessively long meal preparation times. Wait; Secondly, Tian Ye pointed out, “Some merchants pay more attention to dine-in food than take-out, and often deliberately not take orders during busy periods. Chinatown Take-out has also done many optimization strategies reminded by merchants and rating management of merchants, and guide users through recommendation algorithms. Choose merchants with better services to ensure the takeaway experience."

For the rider, Chinatown Takeaway will not only provide standardized packing bags/boxes to merchants and riders, but also provide relevant training for outsourced riders. In Tian Ye's view, the taste of Chinese food delivery is also related to the quality of packaging; for end customers, if the waiting time is controlled within a reasonable time, they will be more satisfied with the delivery quality and service. In addition, Tian Ye said that overseas Chinese users have a very obvious preference for local ingredients, so careful selection of local ingredients in Singapore is also a viable magic weapon for Chinese food delivery.

Chinatown takeaway rider

In addition to understanding the characteristics of Chinese food delivery and the dining habits of overseas Chinese in business, Tian Ye, who has a technical background, has always firmly believed in the empowerment of technology, even in traditional industries such as food delivery. Since restaurants in Southeast Asia are not highly digitalized and rely heavily on the operation of takeaway platforms, Tian Ye hopes to share automation technology for merchants to improve their operational efficiency, so as to achieve a win-win situation for the platform and merchants. The technical team of Chinatown Takeaway can provide merchants with relevant technical support and solutions, such as helping merchants make some in-store electronic menus, in-store automatic ordering machines, docking with POS machines, and providing back-end kitchen operation systems.

At the customer acquisition level, Chinatown food delivery mainly uses mainstream Chinese self-media for socialized communication and user fission. Compared with other traditional customer acquisition channels, self-media (WeChat, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, etc.) has good interactivity and can shorten the distance with users. The user group formed by the social channel is a symbol of the good reputation of Chinatown food delivery. Many new users have become customers and fans of Chinatown food delivery through word of mouth from community users.

At the same time, Chinatown Food Delivery can continuously make operational management and strategic adjustments and optimizations based on the data and opinions of fans. For example, the group point function and bargaining function of Chinatown Food Delivery platform are all functions proposed by users. Take the group point function as an example: you can see a spelling button on the page of each merchant, click to initiate a group point, and send the link of the group point to the WeChat group, and everyone can choose the dish they want Share the freight. Just like Tian Ye said, every user is a friend of Chinatown food delivery and his "product manager". Working together can promote the continuous improvement and iteration of the product.

In addition, the self-media channels of Chinatown takeaways can also provide brand and event support to merchants through video material dissemination, etc., and the corresponding data can also provide merchants to improve/innovate dishes or improve services, which further helps the cooperation between the platform and merchants.

Group function of food delivery in Chinatown

3. Under the general trend of domestic products going overseas, Chinese food delivery has a bright future

Today, Chinatown takeaway has covered Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia and other countries. In the next stage, Tian Ye hopes to continue to use the "city partner" franchise model to reach 200 cities within 2 years. The so-called "city partner" is a franchise partner who has relevant experience in logistics, payment, or supply chain and has its own resources, and is responsible for all businesses in a particular market. Chinatown Takeaway has a mature evaluation mechanism for urban partners. Urban partners with consistent experience in all aspects will receive a relatively high rating. For example, urban partners in Vietnam have complete experience in logistics, payment and supply chain at the same time. If it is a city partner with a relatively low assessment rating, Chinatown Food Delivery will provide more assistance from the company side to help them grow. In terms of the current maturity of the Chinatown food delivery system, city partners can form a small team of 3-5 people to conduct local business, and the replication speed is considerable.

According to data from the General Administration of Customs in 2021, the trade volume of domestic exports in 2020 will reach nearly RMB 18 trillion, and the export of domestic products to sea is the general trend. Looking forward to future development, Tian Ye said that in the future, Chinatown Takeaway will become a global partner of domestic brands going overseas. It can use Internet operations to help overseas merchants build international brands and build overseas supply chains from demand insight, brand promotion to channel construction. Online, Chinatown Takeaway cooperates with local malls and group-buying platforms to meet users' rigid needs for domestic products and seasonal specialties. Offline, Chinatown food delivery can help brands and companies going overseas to cooperate with local merchants, supermarkets and other channels to achieve long-term stable sales.

Under the combined effect of the online economy and the wave of going out to sea, we will wait and see what changes will happen to the structure of the Southeast Asian food delivery industry.