Startup Idea : Order hawker food and collect from vending machine
Hate queuing just to get your lunch? Why not order your lunch via an app and collect it at a designated vending machine later at your convenient? These entrepreneurs are looking to hack the way we get our daily hawker food.
Living and working in Singapore, lunch hour can be a time consuming and frustrating experience during peak times. Where you need to queue up to get your food and hunt for an empty seat while carrying your food around to park your butt.
In Singapore, fastbee.sg is a website that allows you to order your lunch online and collect it from a vending machine by tapping in your phone number. The vending machine helps to keep the food warm and prevent unwanted person collecting the food you'd paid for.
This is kinda similar to what you can get in Japan, where you pay for the food you want to eat at the vending machine first before getting into the restaurant to eat. Just tweak it a little to make it more consumer friendly.
Oh ok, don't want to collect from the vending machine? No fret, www.whyq.sg helps you to beat the queue by delivering your order straight to you with a flat delivery fee of SGD 1.50
You can browse the hawkers available at https://www.whyq.sg/browse/hawkers, order the food and presto, they will deliver the food to you.
If SGD 1.50 can help me to fix my hunger problem and prevent me from wasting my youth away queueing. Yeah, SDG 1.50 is an acceptable rate for me.
One the features that set these new online ordering platforms from let say FoodPanda is that they don't have a minimum order and charge low-delivery fee. In order to keep the cost low, they also focus on a specific area. Hence, the service is not available everywhere yet and this means an opportunity to fill in the gap.
Food delivery idea is not new and if you're looking to replicate this idea, keep an eye on your costs and develop operating procedures to minimize mistakes. As long it stills involve a lot of "moving parts" (humans to look at the order, cook, pack and deliver), the costs will be high and chances of mistake/sabotage will be high too.
Definitely an idea worth exploring if you're looking to replicate startup ideas. However, remember to start the delivery in the area with a high density of office workers until you're able to scale properly.
See also : Moby Mart - self driving 24 x 7 super market
By Adam Ng
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