Komsan Chiyadis
GrabFood delivery-partner, Thailand
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Singapore’s Wok Master uses GrabFood Business Insights to optimise its menu
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May 17, 2024
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Singapore
Singapore might be small, but it takes its food seriously. The city-state has close to 14,000 food and beverage (F&B) businesses vying for customer attention.
Among those is Wok Master, founded by Anthony Chan, Terrence Tan, Wee Liang, and Darren Lim, who are already experienced in the F&B world through their coffee chain, Coffee Hive.
Started in 2016, Wok Master is a casual “Zi Char”, or food stall-style restaurant that offers east-west fusion dishes based on Chinese cooking.
It’s difficult for an Asian restaurant in Singapore to stand out. But Darren Lim, one of the restaurant owners, says there are ways to garner attention both from old and new customers. Creative menu bundles during festive seasons pose the perfect opportunity.
Tapping business data and insights for better menus
The GrabFood platform plays a strategic role in the company’s business operations. Wok Master does well during festive seasons, offering value bundles and limited-time promotions to boost sales. The Business Insights feature of GrabFood’s merchant portal is crucial in providing the data and insights to help Wok Master identify its top dishes and prepare for sales surges.
For instance, Lim and the team came up with the Yu Sheng Bundle for the Lunar New Year. Yu Sheng—a type of seafood salad—is a traditional dish consumed during these festivities in Singapore.
Through the Business Insights feature, the Wok Master team identified some of the best-selling dishes, such as the Baby Abalone Yu Sheng and the Crispy Fried Grouper with Special Sauce, and bundled those into a special menu set.
Data from the GrabFood platform helped determine the right price for such bundles, too. The Wok Master team created several bundles of their best-selling dishes with prices ranging from S$80 to S$180 for groups of four to six. This price range for bundles was chosen because data insights from GrabFood showed that the average transaction amount per person was about S$20.
“We’re constantly thinking of new promotions,” said Lim. Occasions like Mother’s Day and holidays pose the perfect opportunity to experiment. Lim added that the team reviews the restaurant’s Business Insights weekly. “It helps us understand what the popular dishes are and what our customers like to order. We then bundle those dishes together and create a new promotion. With these insights, we have the opportunity to boost our online sales.”
Going further with GrabFood Business Insights data
There are more ways to leverage data for smoother operations. Wok Master uses the Peak Hours graph on the GrabFood merchant portal to understand when the restaurant needs extra manpower to manage peak sales periods.
The team also learns from qualitative insights through the platform. For example, studying customer reviews and feedback revealed that drinks were spilling during transit. So the team added extra spillage covers. “It’s a fabulous feature because we understand how we can improve our operations and our food,” says Lim.
Also read: Is the customer always right? Merchants are reading reviews to get feedback
From making data-driven tweaks to its menus and prices, to improving kitchen operations: Wok Master has found GrabFood to be the perfect digital companion for its F&B business.
It’s a growth driver for both online and offline sales, as it creates brand awareness online and encourages customers to visit the physical outlets.
Wok Master incentivises these online-offline crossovers with a number of Instagram strategies, such as inviting influencers to dine in and post photos of the Wok Master menu items. It also plans to use GrabFood’s Dine In deal vouchers to incentivise delivery customers to try their favourite dishes in-store.
Since 2022, Wok Master saw an 8 to 10 per cent growth in its online deliveries through GrabFood. It’s also the strongest performing food delivery channel for Wok Master.
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Komsan Chiyadis
GrabFood delivery-partner, Thailand
COVID-19 has dealt an unprecedented blow to the tourism industry, affecting the livelihoods of millions of workers. One of them was Komsan, an assistant chef in a luxury hotel based in the Srinakarin area.
As the number of tourists at the hotel plunged, he decided to sign up as a GrabFood delivery-partner to earn an alternative income. Soon after, the hotel ceased operations.
Komsan has viewed this change through an optimistic lens, calling it the perfect opportunity for him to embark on a fresh journey after his previous job. Aside from GrabFood deliveries, he now also picks up GrabExpress jobs. It can get tiring, having to shuttle between different locations, but Komsan finds it exciting. And mostly, he’s glad to get his income back on track.
