Grab’s F&B sales up 61% in 2020

MANILA, Philippines — Sales of food and beverages (F&B) on the GrabFood platform rose 61 percent last year as more consumers are turning to online channels for their purchases with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

In an online briefing yesterday, Grab Philippines country head Grace Vera Cruz presented the app’s F&B Trends report, pointing out that on GrabFood alone, monthly active F&B businesses in the Philippines grew by more than 60 percent in 2020 and total sales grew by 61 percent.

“More and more consumers are now relying on online platforms to acquire essential items such as F&B,” she said.

In terms of actual users, she said the report showed families with children are the main consumers of food delivery services, with 65 percent of them belonging to the 25 to 44-year-old age group.

She said what drives Filipinos to try new restaurants and the frequency they do so are the variety of food choices, value for money, as well as promotions and visual appeal of the products.

The top food categories Filipinos were looking for in the app are fast food, pizza, cake, bakery, Chinese, doughnuts, milk tea, burgers, coffee and chicken.

Cake orders went up by 2.6 times last year compared to a year ago.

Milk tea, meanwhile, remained popular with about four milk tea orders placed every minute during merienda last year.

Vera Cruz said Grab also found that Filipinos have been spending more on breakfast, registering a 35 percent increase last year from 2019.

The average budget for breakfast is at P145 to P147, with orders starting at around 7 a.m. and the peak from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.

Vera Cruz said coffee and tea orders during breakfast grew 2.3 times in 2020, with the top beverages ordered including iced coffee and caramel macchiato.

As the pandemic has accelerated the consumers shift to online platforms, she said Grab wants to be the partner of choice of merchants by helping them adapt to the changes and take advantage of opportunities by providing solutions to better serve customers and grow.

As part of its commitment to merchant partners, she said Grab is set to roll out Grab Online Shop, an e-commerce solution that would make it easier to serve consumers by combining GrabFood and website orders in one portal.

Through the solution, merchant partners will have the flexibility to set their preferred delivery radius, minimum order sizes, delivery fees, as well as mode of delivery.

“We will be making this available to all interested merchants within the next six to eight weeks,” she said.

She said Grab also  launched an offline-to-online GrabPay solution which is designed to help offline businesses set up their online store and have the option to activate GrabPay checkout for their payments.

Another solution being made available by Grab, called campaign packages, allows merchant partners to opt in to their preferred Grab-curated marketing packages which combine relevant advertising and promotional solutions.

Grab is also working with the International Finance Corp. (IFC) to improve financial literacy among small businesses and in line with this, IFC’s world-class training materials would be available for free for merchant partners via GrabAcademy on the GrabMerchant app.

As for complaints on rude drivers, Vera Cruz said Grab is addressing all these based on its code of conduct and those found to have committed violations may be banned from the platform.