GrabFood, the food delivery service of Southeast Asian self-labelled “super app” Grab, said its plans to create more than 50 cloud kitchens, so-called “GrabKitchens” across Indonesia by the end of this year.
GrabKitchens are similar to food courts, where food vendors operate a stall but typically prepare food that is then picked up and distributed by delivery drivers instead of being served to customers on-site.
The head of marketing of GrabFood and new business at Grab Indonesia, Ichmeralda Rachman reveals, GrabKitchen grew its gross merchandize volume (GMV) 25 times since the first one launched in April 2019. Grab now operates 10 such facilities.
“Our source of growth will be driven by GrabKitchens in the second semester 2019. It is not easy to determine the ideal location for GrabKitchens, so we use data to fill the gaps to better understand cuisine demands,” Rachman said at the launching of the 10th GrabKitchen in Jakarta.
Rachman mentioned that GrabFood has gained almost 50% of market share in the first half 2019, compared to 15% of market share at the beginning 2018. GrabFood’s overall gross merchandise value (GMV) grew three times in the same period. She said Grab targets to be the first player in the food delivery service in Indonesia at the end of third quarter 2019. This implies that it intends to overtake rival Gojek, which claims to be the top food delivery service in Indonesia.
The new GrabKitchens are in fact not pure cloud kitchens because they do include a dine-in concept. For Grab, the dine-in concept is a first. Its competitor GoFood conceptualized its cloud kitchen-equivalent GoFood Festival as a mix of dine-in and delivery from the start.
“This is our experiment to develop a new concept, said Sai Alluri, the head of GrabKitchen at the event. “We will observe the market response and plan to have some dine-in concepts in our GrabKitchens this year.”