Meituan to Launch Food Delivery Butler Service for Restaurants, Speeding Growth of Take-away Services
According to DoNews on June 23rd, Meituan announced that it will launch a “Food Delivery Butler Service” to provide free take-away operation support to small and medium-sized restaurants across the country.
It is reported that the “Food Delivery Butler Service” will gain around $232,000 in the first phase of this year, providing 30,000 small and medium-sized restaurants with online operation support for three months free of charge. At present, there are 25 pilot cities and 6,000 stores participating in the program, and the food delivery transaction volume of participating restaurants has increased more than 50% on average.
According to the relevant person in charge of Meituan, unlike traditional catering operations, Food Delivery Butler Service aims mainly at the online operation of restaurants. They will combine the data of similar delivery operations in business districts, detect problems of restaurants’ online operations and present solutions to help optimize their operations.
IFeng News said that food delivery is becoming more and more important in the catering business of restaurants. According to the Report on the Development of China’s Food Delivery Market in 2020, from 2015 to 2019, the market scale of China’s food delivery market showed a rapid upward trend, with a compound annual growth rate of 45.46%. By the end of 2020, the transaction scale of the national food delivery market has reached around $13.2 billion, and more than 670,000 new food delivery related enterprises have been added.
In 2015, there were only 15,000 registered riders in Meituan, but Meituan and Ele.me are the two largest food delivery platforms in China, which together occupy more than 90% of the market in China.
According to the BBC, due to the troubles brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese food delivery riders have actually increased in number. Meituan recently revealed that its platform has registered 10 million riders. Many riders have also sent medical materials and essential goods to residents. Some netizens said that during the epidemic, Chinese people could safely stay at home thanks to the developed food delivery system.
Online Food Delivery Service Market, a report made by Evolve Business Intelligence, said the global online food delivery service is expected to be valued at $109.38 Billion by 2028 and is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 19.63% from 2020 to 2028.
