foodpanda co-founder Rohit Chadda talks to Business Today about the expansion plans of online food ordering platform foodpanda and how he plans to expand to smaller towns. He also talks about how foodpanda competes with other deal websites and how the foodpanda is the food police and puts strict checks on every restaurant not only while sign up but on an ongoing basis through their vendor quality performance management team.
What are the expansion plans of foodpanda?
Commenting on the expansion plans of foodpanda, Rohit Chadda said that he is pleased with the way foodpanda has created the market for online food ordering in emerging markets where there was none. He said he wants to add more and more restaurants to increase the depth of supply on the platform. Rohit Chadda also said that while the online food ordering platform has already become the market leader in Tier 1 and metro cities in India and other emerging markets but he is betting big on the next phase of growth coming from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. With the growth of smartphones and internet penetration in smaller towns, he believes that these will become a significant contributor to foodpanda’s growth story
How to expand online business to smaller towns?
Being a mobile first company, foodpanda brings all its new features and developments to apps first said Rohit Chadda. He said that the people in smaller towns and cities are skipping a generation of computers while getting introduced to the internet. They are not going to use internet first on desktop/laptop as is the case with developed markets but are directly being introduced to internet on their mobile devices. Hence Rohit Chadda believes that the mobile-first strategy of foodpanda is going to be key for them to introduce people to online food ordering in smaller towns rather than a website focussed approach which may have worked for developed markets.
How does foodpanda compete with other restaurant deal websites?
When asked about his take on other websites offering deals and discounts from restaurants, Rohit Chadda said that given the value driven nature of Indian consumers, deals and discounts become important for customer acquisition and hence foodpanda also gets exclusive deals from their partner restaurants for foodpanda users. However, he believes that given the fact that users can order from all kinds of restaurants from foodpanda – from fine dine restaurants to smaller single outlet brands – and get food delivered directly from their mobile phone in a matter of minutes, thats a clear differentiator of foodpanda compared to deal websites.
How does foodpanda sign up new restaurants?
When asked about how does foodpanda sign up new restaurants, co-founder Rohit Chadda told BT about how foodpanda is the food police. He said that foodpanda does a strict quality check before they sign up a restaurant in order to ensure that only quality restaurants are available on the platform to ensure the best customer experience. He also talked about how foodpanda’s vendor quality management team, tracks each restaurant’s performance and ratings on an ongoing basis and when they see that customers are repeatedly complaining about a particular restaurant with no corrective action on performance improvement, the foodpanda team gos ahead and de-lists the poor performing restaurants. Rohit Chadda’s customer first approach ensures that users get the best experience while ordering food online from foodpanda.
Follow me