In Asia we love to eat. We also love to talk about it, almost as much as we eat. In this episode, we get stuck into the marriage between food and tech.
Because if there’s one breakout star of Covid 19 and the great human experience of staying home for prolonged periods, it is food.
It kept us alive, cheered us up, opened up our world to new food choices. There was wholesale migration online of those who cook, as well as those of us who eat. Food delivery, in particular, exploded. At the end of 2019, a Frost & Sullivan report projected that online food delivery is set to supersize to $200 billion by 2025.
And that’s before Covid kicked it into superspeed.
Along with it, food tech, already a super hot sector, caught fire – reservation apps, table management systems, contactless solution, payments – you name it, it was digitised.
This episode, co-hosted by Louise Daley, deputy CEO of Accor Asia Pacific, looks into the trends happening in the food tech space, why this is a golden moment for food tech and asks, who will be the winners. And at the end, we even cover how food will be grown in the future.
Yes, we are all dreaming of becoming farmers one day.
Key takeaways:
The biggest trend
“… the integration of food tech at the enterprise level because before you can scale, anything in food, you actually need the technology. There are lots of pieces of tech in the industry and up until now, they’ve pretty much sat in silos. You’ve had table management, point of sale, inventory management, demand management, delivery. And the restaurant had to bring it together themselves. And the restaurant, for the most part, don’t have big tech departments or big IT departments, so it was extremely challenging for them. What they’re now looking for, and they should be able to find, is an integrated solution.”
Online travel took decades to get to where it is today. Food will get there faster. Why?
“We’ve seen consumer behaviour change really at warp speed. It creates opportunities for enterprise, in in terms of implementing technology in their business, so that they can take advantage of what has been this incredible change in consumer behaviour. Companies tried to do it before, but it was really a little bit early, and that changing consumer behaviours is hard to force. COVID now has changed that for everyone.”
Pictures are worth a thousand eats
There’s research that when customers see pictures of food on their app, they order more – one point of sale recorded a 20% increase in average spend when customers order through the app.
Unlike travel, it will be harder for global players to dominate in food. Here’s why.
“Food is very local and it needs a local adaptation … you’re not just selling the price of something. You’re selling access to a table.”
• Featured image credit: Dmitry-Fisher/Getty Images
