How Foodpanda approached the food delivery downtrend

Digitalisation strengthens Foodpanda’s partnerships with restaurants for personalised customer experience.

Cognisant of the slowdown in food delivery spending across Southeast Asia in 2022, Foodpanda has taken steps such as adding new features that would help increase customer frequency on the app.

“There was a period during the last year of the lockdowns when food delivery was a habit for customers. And for us, the challenge was to make it a habit for customers even after the lockdowns were lifted,” Toshit Bharara, Foodpanda senior director for Asia Pacific, told Retail Asia.

Foodpanda introduced a lot of features that would help increase customers’ use of the app such as the Panda Pro subscription program, which offers additional benefits on food deliveries.

At present, the program has over a million subscribers and the frequency of customers on Foodpanda has increased since its launch, said Bharara.

In addition, Foodpanda focused on newer verticals, such as grocery delivery, Foodpanda pickup, and Foodpanda dining.

Bharara said Foodpanda Dine, which was launched only recently, offers discounts to customers who use Foodpanda at the outlets. Across the region, they have over 10,000 outlets that offer benefits to subscribers when they dine at the outlet and use their Panda Pro subscription.

To remain competitive, Bharara said one trend that Foodpanda has leveraged is that delivery has become a norm for restaurants, and that has proven to be a good business driver for them.

Another trend he cited is the public’s receptiveness to digital tools, such as QR codes on tables, which shows that there is a clear trend toward digitisation from restaurants.

Foodpanda’s place in all this is made by restaurants that look at increasing loyalty and frequency, both on online and offline channels, by considering a customer’s preference for food delivery, self-pickup, and dining.

Bharara said the future of delivery would be customer personalisation, and Foodpanda is doing a lot of innovations on how they display restaurants on their app and personalised menu items that can help them drive growth on the platform.

He cited their building of a vendor portal that allows restaurants to manage their operations and provide them with different digital tools to enhance their visibility on Foodpanda.

“[Restaurants can] be a part of different campaigns to be able to grow their orders… manage their menus and listing health on Foodpanda, which helps them get more orders right,” Bharara said.

Going a step further to assist in restaurant digitalisation, he said Foodpanda launched new tools like Panda Merchant, which helps restaurants manage their suppliers and procurement process through an app.