Imagine making your way across the clogged cities of Jakarta, Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur to the nearest supermarket, just so you can pick up some fresh produce to cook dinner for the family.
Think about the time you’re wasting waiting in traffic and standing in long checkout queues, or the transport costs you’re spending getting to and from the supermarket.
GrabFresh can deliver high-quality fresh food and frozen products – yes, even ice-cream – to your doorstep within an hour, or at a pre-arranged and convenient time. All for possibly less than what it takes for you to make a trip to the shops and back.
We’ve partnered with HappyFresh, the region’s No. 1 grocery delivery provider, to bring the on-demand grocery delivery service to our users. This is part of our recently announced strategy to build Southeast Asia’s first everyday superapp by opening our platform to best-in-class partners who can offer highly-used and relevant services.
This partnership allows us to expand into the largest category of household expenditure in the region, taking us a step forward to becoming the region’s everyday superapp.
You can already use Grab to commute, get lunch, deliver packages and pay for shopping. Now, with GrabFresh, you have a selection of more than 100,000 grocery products from over 50 large supermarket chains and specialty grocery chains to shop from – all from the comfort of home.
“Grocery delivery is a huge opportunity in Southeast Asia. From our research, 70% of grocery delivery app users shop at least once per week, and they like to shop from the stores that they are familiar with. What they want is for their preferred items to be available and ready, when they want it,” said Guillem Segarra, CEO of HappyFresh.
“Grab is the best possible partner we could have. The large number of couriers that they have allows us to add more delivery slots and improve delivery time.”
GrabFresh will be available as a beta service in Jakarta from this month, and will be available in Thailand and Malaysia by the end of this year. Other countries will follow.
Picking what you want
In Southeast Asia, being able to touch the food that you buy, especially fresh produce, is important to a lot of people. That’s why GrabFresh relies on highly trained personal shoppers who know how to pick the right items and can respond to specific instructions. You can even reject items that are not satisfactory at the door.
These shoppers are professionally trained at HappyFresh Academy to be the best pickers. With input from chefs, dietitians, nutritionists, hygienists, and other experts in the food industry, the in-house professional training school continuously teaches the shoppers to pick the best avocado, the freshest fish.
Our shoppers are stationed full-time in the supermarkets and because they focus only on picking the freshest groceries, they often become the expert of the product range at the store.
While going to the supermarket to buy groceries for your family may be deeply ingrained behaviour, we believe that consumer habits are likely to change. Based on forecasts by economic analysts IHS, the region is set to be the fourth largest economy by 2050. As disposable income levels rise, consumers are likely to prioritise time and convenience.
“More people are moving into the middle class, technology infrastructure is catching up, and companies must adapt fast to shifting emerging market opportunities,” said Anthony Tan, Group CEO & Co-founder, Grab. “Combining Grab’s assets with the specialised expertise of our partners will enable both Grab and our partners to grow most efficiently and quickly to serve more Southeast Asian consumers daily.”