Leading Online Food Delivery Platform in the Philippines Launches “Cloud Kitchen” Concept

February 2020

GrabFood, the leading online delivery platform in the Philippines, has introduced its first ever GrabKitchen in the country, a central kitchen wherein food establishments are gathered in one location to reduce delivery time for orders. GrabKitchen offers users in a particular geography a variety of curated food selections from one central kitchen. By leveraging data from historical orders to address cuisine gaps, and working with its merchant partners who want to expand their delivery footprint, GrabKitchens aims to bridge consumer demand and selection of available food.

For merchant-partners and micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), GrabKitchen is a cost-efficient way to expand the geographic area they serve and reach more consumers using technology. Cloud kitchens can also lower their cost of operations by eliminating high capital investments like rental costs, which is one of the most expensive expansion constraints for the merchant-partners. Apart from helping merchant partners expand and rely less on foot traffic, consumers also benefit from GrabKitchen by being allowed to mix and match orders to the different merchants.

GrabKitchen opens in the Philippines with a branch in Glorietta 2, located in Makati’s central business district, featuring six merchant-partners – Omakase, Mister Kabab, 24 Chicken, Recovery Food, and Frank and Dean – all of which do not have a physical store in Makati City, and CoCo Fresh Tea and Juice that has seen a significant increase in sales, prompting it to expand its delivery-only operations in GrabKitchen. In exchange for locating in GrabKitchen, GrabFood would be getting a certain percentage of the transactions. The merchant partners would have their own enclosed space within the GrabKitchen site in order to ensure protection of trade secrets.

Although cloud kitchens are delivery-only by nature, the flagship GrabKitchen store in Glorietta 2 has an in-store dining capability that offers a unique digital experience through a self-order kiosk.

GrabKitchen was first introduced in Indonesia in 2018 and has since become the largest regional cloud kitchens operator in South East Asia. GrabKitchen has over 50 branches in South East Asia including Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, and the Philippines. In the Philippines, GrabFood is looking at expanding to at least four more locations by 2020. GrabFood is investing in putting up GrabKitchen outlets in the country amid high growth in the food delivery business. In the past 12 months, volume of orders through the Grab app have risen 15 times. GrabKitchen was first launched in Indonesia in 2018.To date, there are over 50 GrabKitchen branches in Southeast Asia.

(Sources: Grab Philippines; The Philippine Star)

Our Services

Orissa International provides consulting services to companies that want to develop a market entry strategy for Southeast Asia or implement their business expansion into the region. We have very strong domain knowledge of markets and industry sectors, and a business network of over 16,000 distributors, resellers, and system integrators, built through advising and guiding more than 5,000 companies with their market expansion into Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines over the last 25 years.