Guo Bonan (郭博楠) has opened several new branches of his “8Peppers” (小蠻椒) spicy Sichuan-style restaurants across Shanghai since last year, and not one has a dining room.
He does not need them — stationed outside each outlet are packs of food deliverymen on motorbikes waiting to whisk dishes from Guo’s steaming kitchens to homes, office buildings and factories across the city of 24 million.
China’s app-based meal-delivery boom of the past two years has introduced several now-familiar phenomena: families and office workers huddling around mobile phones to place orders, delivery scooters scattering pedestrians on crowded sidewalks, and mountains of empty plastic meal containers.
Photo: AFP
However, it is also fueling wider change by shrinking restaurants and reducing how often families cook at home while allowing millions to fry up meals in their own home kitchens and ship them to hungry buyers.
“In a rapidly developing city like Shanghai, time is money. So people don’t want to spend it cooking for themselves anymore,” said Guo, 29, adding that many younger people like him are no longer learning how to cook.
8Peppers focuses purely on delivery through leading platforms like Ele.me (餓了麼) and Meituan (美團), avoiding the expense of paying waiters and maintaining a dining space.
Business is good. 8Peppers now has 10 branches and Guo is a partner in a separate kitchen-only project with eight outlets and hundreds more planned nationally.
Passionate about food, Chinese are also eager adopters of e-commerce, a potent combination for delivery start-ups.
More than 200 billion yuan (US$32 billion) worth of meals were delivered last year, equalling Bolivia’s GDP, a figure expected to grow another 20 percent this year, consultancy iiMedia Research Group (艾媒諮詢) said.
Users of meal-ordering platforms tripled in two years to 343 million last year, the China Internet Network Information Center said, the vast majority using mobile apps.
The delivery cost of a few yuan is no deterrent as Chinese incomes rise, Ele.me founder and CEO Zhang Xuhao (張旭豪) said.
“Price is not so important anymore. Convenience and efficiency get the most attention, especially among Chinese born in the 90s or 2000s,” Zhang said.
Ele.me is now working on user-data systems that can help restaurateurs determine where to open for maximum sales, and testing delivery drones.
With its massive and growing cities, “China’s potential is extremely large,” Zhang said.
The industry is another proxy battle between e-commerce heavyweight Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) and gaming and social media rival Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) in their struggle for tech dominance in everything from online games to content and mobile payments.
Alibaba is an Ele.me backer while Tencent is heavily invested in Meituan. Delivery platforms have raised billions in venture capital and are said to be burning cash via discounts to grab market share, with growth rates expected to slow.
However, the industry impact will deepen, analysts say.
“It will change restaurant design. Kitchen space only used to be one-fourth of a restaurant. But restaurants are now becoming something like processing centers for delivery,” said Wang Yuke (王玉珂) of real-estate consultancy RET (睿意德).
Su Xiaosu struggled after migrating several years ago from rural Jiangsu Province to Shanghai, where she married. But in 2016, she joined fast-growing platform Hui Jia Chi Fan (回家吃飯), which plugs home kitchens into delivery networks and is now in six cities. Su, 34, now grosses up to 3,000 yuan per day, an eye-popping take for most Chinese, by frying up Jiangsu specialties in her tiny home kitchen and handing them to blue-clad Ele.me deliverymen in her apartment stairwell. She can now afford a foreign tutor for her young daughter and has plans to buy an apartment, once only a dream.
“My biggest concern is upsetting my neighbors. There are crowds of deliverymen during peak hours and some elderly neighbors sleep early,” Su said.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
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