Food delivery: a booming concept
It is becoming increasingly easy to have your meals delivered to your home. It only takes a few clicks. But it’s not a new concept. It is now possible to have your meals delivered from your favourite restaurant without the restaurant even having a delivery man. You just need internet access via your mobile, desktop or tablet and in a few clicks you can have anything delivered. This is called “Food Delivery Service”. Over the years, food delivery service has taken into Myanmar as well as the living styles in Yangon are changing.
In this penetration, the food industry has evolved into transformative space, combining with food delivery services which offer greater convenience and high demand of consumers .
The growth of the Myanmar’s food delivery service market is supported by people’s increasingly busy lifestyles and rising incomes, along with deepening smartphone and internet penetration. In accordance with the research, Yangon Door2Door, Food2U, Deliverink, Hi-So Mall, food panda and other delivery services such as Grab Food have come in to Myanmar food delivery market.
Among them, Yangon Door2Door is one of the food delivery services which is the premier online food ordering and delivery service which was started since 2013 earlier than many food deliveries. The process is like, Yangon Door2Door picks up the completed order from the restaurant, and delivers the items to the customers through bicycles or by cars on an as-needed basic for larger orders .
Shady Ramadan, CEO and founder of Yangon Door2Door said “At our first journey, people told our delivery service with a bicycle is not going to happen. But we have always been trying to say that we can do this and we always need to keep the best services in the market so that this is where we are now as the first food delivery service in Myanmar.”
Customer experience is essential
Customers want to be able to order as fast as possible, having real-time support. They want a smooth customer experience.
For example, customers in the UK can order from local restaurants through delivered with a simple text message. Difficulty resides in simplicity: the idea of making purchases as simple as possible requires the delivery companies to know a lot of information about the customers, which is still difficult to do without an appropriate platform.
As the first journey of all food delivery services, there are always “must-need” ways to get customer’s belief.
“Customers want the the food in time so,we have to bring them the food in time. This is kind of strategy to get customer’s beliefs. Everyone in this food delivery service have to be linked because as customers, it is unacceptable to be late and to make excuses. So, we push all the time as much as we can so that customers won’t be disappointed,” said Shady .
As one of the loyal customers of Yangon Door2Door, Lwin Moe Aung who is currently working in Irrawaddy English Edition says “I am the type of person who never puts effort in preparing for three meals. So for me, using food delivery service can give me greater convenience , saving-time with fair delivery fees.”
The reason why choosing Yangon Door2Door among other food delivery services is “ I don’t need to wait more than 30 mins to get my order. So I love when Yangon Door2Door brings my order as fast as they can .” he added.
The Growing Food Delivery Market In Global and Myanmar
According to the global research, the global food ordering and the delivery market is growing rapidly in most countries, with an overall annual growth rate estimated at just 3.5 percent for the next five years.
Currently, out of the total traditional food ordering market, 47% is offline while 53% is conducted online. This figure is expected to flip in the next couple of years. Overall, this sector is growing at an annual rate of 3.7%, but interestingly, online food ordering and the delivery sector was expected to grow at 15-20% in 2019.
The food delivery industry is expected to have a market volume of $146,654million by 2022. The largest segment of the food delivery market is restaurant-to-consumer delivery with a market volume of $58,008 million by 2020.
There has been tremendous growth in the online food delivery sector in the past few years and is expected to grow at a rapid pace in the coming few years.
The process of growing food delivery service in Myanmar and other countries is totally different. Unlike other countries, Myanmar is very different, just an opening up country which is very much ethics influencing in terms of developing. It is also in early stages of a lot of changes taking place.
Among many delivery services, Yangon Door2Door is the first food delivery business in Myanmar. Shady Ramadan also mentioned “The idea why we started this service is that Myanmar people are goot at IT but they don’t know where to and how to find a platform. So I put strategies in marketing, branding with new concept of delivering with bicycles and it works finally.”
Challenges Faced by Food Delivery Services
According to the global food delivery companies, though the online food delivery market offers immense commercial potential, it also presents some major challenges. One of the challenges global food delivery companies are facing is that inconsistent food quality.
It is a challenging task to maintain the quality of food being delivered until it reaches at the customers’ door-step. There is no comparison of the quality food delivered on tables in the restaurant with the food delivered in a box in the name of instant home delivery. Food is always prone to quality lapse irrespective of the measures taken in packaging to provide first class food delivery to the customers. There’s a major probability of pizza becoming cold, curry might spill, noodles turn sticky while sandwiches get moist. The customers equate the quality of food served in restaurants to the quality of delivery.
Ramadan also said “In the beginning, I faced a lot of challenges like hiring people and messengers training and finding restaurants for partnership deals. It is not easy to get people who will give you your food in time and in a manner, in a nice way, hygienically following the rules. But we have always been trying to find solutions.”
Another challenge for food delivery services like Yangon Door2Door is finding vendors and a reliable partnership that can guarantee Yangon Door2Door access to the goods. With hard work, 500 restaurants and vendors have reportedly patnered with Yangon Door2Door.
Despite a rapid increase in user bases as awareness of the delivery services has grown, most of the customers are young people. According to the Frontier’s Article of “Pedal Power Recipe for Business Success”, nearly half of Yangon Door2Door’s users are aged between 25 and 34 and most of Deliverink’s users are between 26 and 38.
Ramadan believes that city planning could benefit his business, his customers and the environment, and he urged policymakers to create safer, more bike-friendly streets and promote awareness about transit alternatives.
“We will always keep expanding in doing good services , adding more services and trying to make the services more interesting for people. And then, we always think about how to help our customers save more time rather than sitting in a traffic, for an hour with bicycle service.” said Ramadan.
