“The pandemic has made its impact throughout the world, leaving online deliveries as the safest go-to option during a time when unnecessary social interaction is discouraged”, mentioned Muntaqa Peracha, Commercial Director, Foodpanda during an exclusive Q&A session with our editor in Chief while discussing the impact of COVID-19 on business continuity and shared his view on overall economic situation in Pakistan.
1. How do you see the overall landscape of the economy in Pakistan post COVID-19?
Majority business operations have been affected due to services being halted; with a complete shift to work from home for almost a month now. There are a lot of industries that have been affected due to the lock-down. Currently, no one can predict when we’ll be able to call this world a post COVID-19 world. The impact that we see on the economy right now is going to continue for a bit and will impact everyone in the food chain. We have to find new ways to innovate, re-engineer our businesses and empower ourselves to be ready for whatever change a post COVID-19 world brings.
There’s a lot of potential in the country and we believe foodpanda can play an active role in stabilizing the economy. Foodpanda is proud to enable economic empowerment in the country and we aim to continue doing so. We have one of the largest rider fleets in Pakistan and I believe partnering with the government is the need of the hour. Food-service research category director of Mintel Group told Food Navigator (a leading online news source for food industry) about how food delivery platforms in the United Kingdom including Deliveroo and Just Eat have made a shift to Contact Free deliveries to minimize human contact. According to Gulf News, UAE’s leading food delivery platforms including Zomato and Talabat have also adapted Contact Free deliveries as a method to combat the pandemic. In China, locals shifted to Alibaba for their daily essentials, making sure to stay within the barriers of social distancing, right before the lock-down was confirmed in Wuhan.
2. In the context of business continuity, what challenges and opportunities do you see in the current crisis scenario?
Countries that were able to curb COVID-19, were primarily able to do so by shifting towards online deliveries and observing self-quarantine. During the current crisis situation, foodpanda repurposed our business model by introducing and launching pandamarts within 4 days by adding groceries and medicines to our platform. This ensures safety and hygiene standards and minimal human interaction. We have also doubled down our efforts to increase the number of home-chefs on our platform. This gives a brilliant opportunity for all to earn extra income and especially empowers women to be able to run business independently and we are quickly scaling up to 100,000 home-chefs across Pakistan.
After the initial lock-down phase, once things settled down and became consistent in terms of timings, open/close areas, government notifications etc., we have seen a huge growth with order volumes seeing record demand from customers. The pandamart vertical, especially groceries and medicines has seen brilliant results and a daily increase in orders.
Seeing demand from other expansion cities where we are now pushing to open up 3-4 cities every month starting from April. Smaller cities have also seen a surge providing us an opportunity to hire more employees and grow the organisation. This also provides employment opportunities to daily wagers and people out of a job in the form of joining our fleet of heroes to deliver food and other goods to people.
3. What measures have you taken to support your front-line staff and riders?
Our most important stakeholders are our heroes, who are daily wagers. With most businesses shut, the biggest struggle daily wagers are currently facing is financial instability so we are putting them at the forefront of all our decisions to figure out ways that they are able to sustain themselves. This included giving extra incentives to them per delivery, enhancing their insurance coverage and introducing monetary support programs.
In addition to this, we have taken multiple safety initiatives to ensure safer deliveries for both customers and riders, which includes providing face masks, gloves and sanitizers to each rider, mandatory temperature check before the start of every shift, installing washbasins outside hubs and restaurants and introducing contact-less deliveries.
foodpanda has partnered with multiple NGOs including Saylani Welfare Trust, JDC, Food saver, Al-Khidmat Foundation, and United Nations Associations of Pakistan (UNAP) and hospitals like Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital, Indus Hospital, to financially support daily wagers across the country as they provide monetary support to the NGOs, enabling them to support daily wagers.
There are not only customers and staff members who are our stakeholders, but also the front-line workers who are fighting the battle during COVID. We honor such heroes and their meals are on us. We’ve started this activity in multiple cities, scaling it gradually all over Pakistan, providing more than 5,000+ meals so far.
We have also finalised a relief package for the food industry to help our vendors navigate through these tough times which will be announced in more detail in the coming few days.
4. How do you see consumer behaviour shifting towards digital during this crisis time and what is your approach while understanding and responding to their needs?
World is moving towards digital. Foodpanda has already partnered with FinTechs to utilise their wallets and digital applications for payments to riders. We have been working with Jazz and HBL Konnect and adding more players to the ecosystem. This has been a lifesaver, especially during these times, with payments sent to our rider partners directly to their wallets, payments collected from customers (COD) transferred via wallets as well without the need to go to a bank. There is still a long way to go in terms of a shift away from COD but e-commerce players like foodpanda have a huge say in enhancing this trust and shift to digital payments.
