Boolanga Business Bites

Your Personal Navigator in the Ever-Evolving World of Food Delivery

Week 11/03/2024

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🍕 Food Delivery

Data from Seattle food delivery drivers shows higher hourly earnings, but less customer demand. Seattle-area gig workers are making higher hourly wages while they’re delivering food for platforms such as Uber Eats and DoorDash following the implementation of a new minimum wage law (Geek Wire).

Florida bill would allow more communication between restaurants, delivery customers. Restaurants would be able to contact third-party delivery customers for up to two hours after their order has been picked up (Restaurant Business).

Uber Eats announced new initiatives to help combat food insecurities. This includes allowing consumers to use SNAP/EBT to order groceries directly through the Uber Eats app (Food on demand).

Uber Eats Adds Live Location Sharing as Aggregators Compete to Reduce Friction. As on-demand delivery aggregators race to offer the most easy, seamless customer experience, Uber Eats is adding live location sharing for hard-to-find deliveries (PYMNTS).

Baron boosts Swiggy valuation to $12.16B, above prior private market value. Baron Capital, an investor in Indian food delivery startup Swiggy, has increased the value of its stake in the Indian firm, implying a valuation of $12.16 billion, surpassing the $10.7 billion post-money valuation at which Swiggy secured funding in early 2022 (Techcrunch).

Swiggy to offer food delivery services to train passengers in India. Passengers will place orders through the IRCTC app by entering their passenger name record and selecting their station for delivery (Verdict Food Service).

Meituan Goes Overseas to Re-Explore Middle East Market. From October 2022 to mid-2023, Zhu Wenqian, head of the overseas department of Meituan's strategic investment, visited the Middle East several times to understand the local business policy and investigate the current situation of competition in the local takeaway business (Equal Ocean).

Brazil’s Lula proposes labor rights for rideshare drivers. Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sent a bill to Congress on Monday that would create labor rights for rideshare drivers that use apps like Uber and 99 (Brazil Reports).

Grab shrank its superapp by a quarter in order to survive. Large APKs and disk footprints spell doom in a developing market (The Register).

For food delivery workers, getting paid is not easy despite minimum wage (News Advance).

Zomato takes food delivery to cinema halls, days after Swiggy announces it will deliver orders in trains. Zomato and rival Swiggy dominate the food delivery market in the country, accounting for about 95 percent of the entire business. Zomato has turned profitable, Swiggy has not (Storyboard 18).

Uber Eats Sri Lanka has announced the introduction of a service fee on orders on the popular food and grocery delivery app. From February 29, customers will notice a restructuring in fees, aimed at sustaining a reliable and efficient food delivery service (The Island Online).

Daily Tech Roundup: JD.com Logistics Arm Fesses Up to Fraud. After a three-month investigation, Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com’s logistics unit Dada Nexus Ltd. confirmed that the company had inflated its revenues and costs to hit the company’s targets (Caixin Global).

China Online Food Delivery Market Report 2024-2032 Featuring Ele.me, Meituan Dianping, ENJOY, Daojia, and Home-cook. The China online food delivery market size reached US$ 74.2 billion in 2023 (Yahoo Finance).

📱 eCommerce

Target Launches Target Circle 360 Subscription, Competing with Amazon Prime & Walmart+. Target is set to introduce an unlimited rush shipping subscription service to compete with Amazon Prime (TechTimes).

eCommerce retailers at risk due to new email security rules. Recent research suggests that a quarter of eCommerce retailers might suffer a fall in email deliverability due to failing to adhere to Yahoo and Google's newly implemented email authentication measures in February 2024 (eCommerce News).

Amazon loses trademark appeal on cross-border sales. Amazon has infringed on British trademark rights by promoting identical branded products from another party to British shoppers on its US website (Ecommerce News).

eCommerce Merchants Fail to Connect Failed Payments and Fraud. Despite the many fraudsters on the prowl seeking to exploit any vulnerabilities they can find in the payments ecosystem, only about one-third of eCommerce merchants connect the dots between failed payments and potential fraud (PYMNTS).

⚡ Q-Commerce

Zepto Pass gets 1 million subscribers within a week of launch. The membership, which comes at a fee of Rs 99 per month, offers unlimited free deliveries on orders worth more than Rs 99 and discounts of up to 20% based on the order value, ET reported on February 19 (The Economic Times Tech).

India’s Flipkart readies quick-commerce play. The Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart is planning to enter the quick-commerce business, aimed at providing customers with the convenience of receiving their orders instantly after making their purchases, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch (TechCrunch).

BigBasket, Flipkart quicken delivery to counter quick-commerce. Online grocer BigBasket and ecommerce major Flipkart have both cut down on their delivery timeline over the past two months amid increasing competition from quick commerce firms like Blinkit and Zepto and rising consumer demand for speedy delivery even in non-metro cities (The Economic Times Tech).

🍏 Grocery Delivery

Czech online supermarket Rohlik manages to combine investing in serious growth with achieving profitability. As sales grew by 25 % last year (to 700 million euros), the scale-up is already profitable in Czechia, Hungary and the region around Munich (Retail Detail).

Ocado crowned UK’s fastest growing supermarket. Ocado has been crowned as the UK’s fastest growing supermarket as sales jumped 12.2% over the last 12 weeks. The latest data from NIQ shows M&S retained its spot in second place, with sales increasing 11.9% (Getail Gazette).

🛸 Delivery Tech

Delivery Drones Are Gaining a Clearer Commercial Flight Path. Recent federal approvals have retailers ramping up tests, but hurdles to consumer acceptance remain (The Wall Street Journal).

Uber Eats Japan on Wednesday began using self-driving robots for deliveries in Tokyo, a new venture aimed at making the service more efficient amid the country's ongoing labor shortage. The robots are currently used for two stores Tokyo's Nihonbashi area, but the company hopes to roll them out in more areas (The Japan Times).