HappyFresh Prepares for Surabaya

Two weeks ago, leading online grocery delivery platform HappyFresh sealed an investment worth $12 million from a number of investors, including Sinar Mas Digital Ventures (SMDV) and Vertex Venture. DailySocial interviewed HappyFresh’s Co-Founder and CEO Markus Bihler about the funding and its effects to the company’s operations in Indonesia.

Qestion (Q): How will this investment support HappyFresh’s expansion in Indonesia? What does HappyFresh want to improve people’s shopping experience?

Answer (A): We want to expand to numerous cities in Indonesia, as we will soon enter Surabaya. We will make use of our research towards our users’ preference to improve their personal shopping experience. This may mean that we’re ready to launch coupon concept or provide previous purchase-based offers.

Q: What do you think about the condition of grocery delivery segment in Indonesia? How will the market be now that Go-Jek (through Go-Mart) has also joined the competition?

A: The retail industry in Southeast Asia is highly promising. The vast opportunity is accompanied by more advanced consumers and food-lovers, growing population, and stable economic condition. Online retail is vastly growing and our children and grand children won’t discover the world without digital food services.

In Indonesia, middle class and high end consumers will keep pushing online retailers to grow. They care about quality as they would expect for better quality and services. Demand on processed food and dairy products will keep on increasing, along with improvement of lifestyle, due to the long duration people have to spend at their workplaces.

In regard to the competition, we only have relatively small challenges since we’re with supermarket networks instead of against them. Our message to retailers in simple: go ahead and focus on your expertise, which is running supermarket. We will handle the online transaction for you.

Our competitors in Indonesia are either having problems with the volume of items and delivery or multitasking courier vendors. It’s the people to decide, whether they prefer to have their order handled by our professionally trained Personal Shoppers or random ojek drivers.

Q: How to integrate HappyRecipe to HappyFresh?

A: We believe that preparing healthy food is simple. It doesn’t take too long to find the right recipe and shop the required ingredients. With a single click, consumers may have all they need delivered to their front door.

HappyRecipe is a collection of healthy recipe which will be integrated to HappyFresh’s mobile app pretty soon.

Translated by Rifki Aria Nugraha