Your favourite dishes in a single cloud kitchen

Grab is Southeast Asia’s largest and leading superapp, and specialises in ride-hailing, food delivery, and digital payments services on mobile devices. Our team was responsible for the launch of GrabKitchen, which is a cloud based kitchen service, that helps customers have more food choices, closer to their homes and get food quicker.

Client:

Industry:

Food & Nutrition

Retail

How might we increase the accessibility of food whilst allowing for broadened options for optimised eating experiences?

Creating an end-to-end service experience for food lovers across Southeast Asia.

Based on past consumer research and data, GrabFood, the food pillar of Grab realised the need for food on demand. And this was a common consensus across countries in SEA. We also wanted to see how we could maximise our spread to reach consumers as fast as possible, and by providing them quality food with a variety of choices to choose from.

The Process

We embarked on this dream and to make it a reality, we had to consider multiple factors, including the customer and staff experience, as well as the logistics and legalities of it. My team and I led the expansion across SEA (Southeast Asia) and aided in launching the first outlet in Bangkok and in Indonesia.

This involved stakeholder management, behavioural research, operational blueprint mapping and site dry runs.

Outputs

  • Blueprints

  • Dry runs

  • Behavioural research

We conducted a few field observations by visiting up and coming cloud kitchens as well as understanding the behaviours of current customer. Additionally, by posing as customers, we were able to comprehensively understand the journey a customer may go through, from the point of awareness, to the point of engagement, eating and leaving.

Understanding the Problem

  • The cloud kitchens we visited banked on not having any front facing staff. Due to the absence of staff,  there was a lack of natural engagement and as a new concept, customers felt a little disoriented and were lost when they needed assistance with ordering their food or needing clarification.  
  • Some of the cloud kitchens were placed in “hard to reach” areas, and hence, business was slow. 
  • Some of the positives were that with the presence of digital screens, customers were easily able to identify their orders and know which cubby had their orders. This made the food collection independent.

Key Insights

What is the GrabKitchen experience?

Blueprint and Journey mapping workshops

GrabKitchen was to be launched across SEA, in Thailand, Indonesia, The Philippines and Singapore. Our consensus was that it would be easier to launch in a digitally attuned Singapore, as compared to the more challenging, developing markets, such as Indonesia and the Philippines, where food delivery is predominantly running on a concierge model and requires more human interaction. This simply means that when an order is placed, the payment is collected during delivery, via cash, as compared to it being done online.

We decided to start with the more challenging countries, to ensure we can spend more time ironing out their experiences.

We conducted in-person sessions with the country teams and had members from the operations, finance, delivery and customer service departments to create a holistic, end to end journey and blueprint experience for dine in, deliveries and take-aways. I lead some of the blueprint workshops along with my team and ensured we defined a clear enough customer and staff journey. This then lead to identifying what Grab needs to do in the back-end to launch GrabKitchen.

“It was amazing to uncover how unique each country’s service experience can be. For example, in The Philippines, reusable plastic tableware is preferred as compared to some others where they may use disposables.”

As we planned for the logistics and retail partnership for GrabKitchen, we made sure we took business as well as stakeholder experience into consideration.

It was crucial to conduct some dry runs, to ensure that the stakeholder journey that we had created was foolproof. The dry runs acted as a test bed for our team to gather feedback and iterate the staff process and customer experience.

On the right are the dry runs conducted at the Bangkok outlet, based in an open foodcourt.

After multiple iterations, we were close to launching GrabKitchen.

GrabKitchen Dry runs and Testing

Today, Grab has launched 50 cloud kitchens across four Southeast Asian countries, with most of them in Indonesia.

Grab has incorporated GrabKitchen onto its application, allowing customers to order food through the application where they can have it delivered or picked up from GrabKitchen.

Their food delivery business has seen a 5.2 times growth across the region in gross merchandise value and a 173% increase in active users.

By tailoring its solutions in the interest of merchants and customers both, Grab has managed to bridge the cuisine supply and demand gaps.

“Partnering with GrabFood has enabled us to have an expanded reach to more consumers, while minimising the hassle for them to travel to a location for food,” said the founder of Thai Dynasty Pte Ltd