Gridcrosser: Dinner at Your Doorsteps: Foodpanda Online Food Ordering Marketplace sets foot in the Philippines

Monday, July 21, 2014

Dinner at Your Doorsteps: Foodpanda Online Food Ordering Marketplace sets foot in the Philippines

Eating out in a good restaurant can be an adventurous experience and cooking is a fulfilling activity, but these eat up a lot of time. And with our increasingly hectic schedules, time has become a luxury. We have to relegate dining out and cooking to, say, weekends or whenever we can spare some time. Yet we have to eat everyday. If there is no time to cook or eat out, or you are too lazy to, there is one solution—have food delivered to you.

In this increasingly connected world, food delivery can be made by logging in the Internet and by using the mobile phone. This is the service offered by Foodpanda, the online and mobile food ordering service recently introduced in the Philippines.

Foodpanda is part of the German e-commerce venture capital firm Rocket Internet. The company is already active in the Philippines, having launched the brands Zalora and Lazada online retailers. This time, Rocket Internet is trying to capture the online food delivery market with Foodpanda, which began in May 2012.

Together with its affiliated brand Hellofood, which is present in 19 countries in Latin America, Middle East and Africa, Foodpanda is headquartered in Berlin, Germany, with operations in 42 countries. Hellofood and Foodpanda, which are present in 23 countries in Asia and Eastern Europe, have partnerships with more than 22,000 restaurants. Here in the Philippines, Foodpanda has about 500 partnerships with restaurants in the National Capital Region. It is aggressively working to increase that number, as well as expand its presence outside Metro Manila.

“The Philippines has a vibrant food culture, and we are thrilled to be part of it,” said Ralf Wenzel, the global chief executive officer and co-founder of Foodpanda. “We have big plans and look forward to providing our customers with the best food ordering service.”

On the other hand, Jasper Heyden, the managing director of operations in the Philippines, said, “With all this enthusiasm for food here, I am excited to start Foodpanda in the Philippines. The feedback we received from partner restaurants and first clients really shows the huge opportunities in this country.”

Foodpanda’s chief operating officer Felix Plog, who flew in the country in early June for the launch, explained Foodpanda is “basically a restaurant listing site. We try to aggregate the best restaurants in your city. We make transparent what users are really experiencing in those restaurants. Is he having a good experience? Is the food delivered on time? All these you will be able to see in the review section… So if you make up your minds on what to order tonight, you can precisely see what restaurants in your area are delivering to your doorstep.”

Many Filipinos still order food via landline telephone, and it will take some time before they switch to ordering food online. According to Plog, they are trying to wean them away from the telephone.

“It's all about fighting the telephone. The telephone is our enemy,” he said. “So some of you, guys, may be ordering by the phone. It's something from the Stone Age. So please move to the mobile app. Please move to the Web site and order. It's much more convenient. It's much more techie. It's much nicer. It's like trying to win customers from phone ordering but I think by the end of the day we can offer them much better user experience. For example, you can reorder with a click of a button. You don't have to hang in the line, waiting for the restaurant to pick up. You just open the app, push the buttons and then you're done. It's much easier.”

Foodpanda can be accessed through www.foodpanda.ph and the mobile application, which available for free on iPhone, Android, Nokia and Blackberry. It boasts of the easy-to-navigate online menus and the intuitive design. After entering one’s address or letting GPS determine one's position, all the delivering restaurants and cuisines in the area are displayed. Customers can select the dishes they want, and Foodpanda will relay the information to the restaurants, which will then deliver the food to the customers. The site can remember a customer's address, even multiple ones, so there will be no need to retype it every time one orders food. Orders can also be saved online if one wants to order the same foods. The mobile app can filter restaurants by location. Foodpanda also has a review section, where one can read comments of other customers.

Visit www.foodpanda.ph for more information about services and complete list of partner restaurants. Follow Foodpanda on Instagram (foodpanda_ph) and Facebook for updates and deals.