PHILIPPINES—In its continuing commitment to support GrabFood merchants in pushing business ventures towards success, Grab has released the first-ever Food Trends Report zooming in on the Philippine market.
As 2020 became the year where most of us have been stuck in isolation at home in fear of the virus, it also quickly turned into an era of much dependence on digital services and, in turn, food delivery services. Especially with the work-from-home setup limiting people’s time to cook, and just the overall need to sprinkle some excitement from our highly repetitive routines with some non-home cooked meals and snacks.
Given this current situation, the super-app saw it as an opportune time to delve deeper into the general consumer behavior of Filipinos on food, which has drastically changed in a span of months due to the pandemic and varying levels of quarantine.
While the food delivery market has thrived despite our current circumstances, Grab has conducted and shared the “Food Trends Report” to help big and small businesses to map out what’s next. The report highlights key insights, trends, and suggestions on how to innovate further with the data discovered.
The “Grab Next: Food Trends Report 2020/2021″ is based on research conducted by NielsenIQ, as stated on the document. It includes interviews with food industry professionals, restauranteurs, consumer surveys, and focus groups, as well as some insights derived from Grab’s internal database from 2019-2020.
One of the most interesting tidbits of information presented by the report is that the food delivery expenditure in the Philippines, alone, amounted to US$ 1.1 billion over the past year. Filipinos have always loved food and ordering it from several channels, but this year showed exponential growth as an indirect effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.
While the 26-page report details a lot of insights from the derived data and is surely a valuable read, here are 11 highlights from Grab’s Quick Bites infographic that you need to know:
- Cooking at home and food delivery orders went up during the pandemic! Add this to a 72% increase on self pick-up orders!
- 34% of meals eaten in the Philippines are either via take away, delivery, or dining in. Of which, almost 3 in 10 of all non-home cooked meals in the Philippines are via food delivery.
- More Businesses decided to give GrabFood a shot, with the number of monthly active F&B merchants increasing by 60%!
- F&B businesses are booming! Merchants that joined food delivery platforms in 2020 reported a 61% growth in total sales even with dine-in restrictions.
- Families with children are the main consumers of food delivery services with 65% of them belonging to the 25-44 year-old bracket.
- The top reasons why Filipino order food delivery are: (1) to satisfy cravings for food I can’t cook, (2) no time to cook, and (3) no need to worry about traffic/parking.
- Pizza, cakes, and pasta are some of the favorite meals that consumers are not able to cook at home. In fact, pizza was searched 6,000,000 times on GrabFood in 2020.
- Most orders were made for dinner, lunch, and merienda.
- Fun fact: Filipinos love their cake! Cake orders grew by 2.6x in 2020 compared to 2019.
- 2020 saw Filipinos spending more on breakfast with a 35% increase in basket size for this part of the day.
- In 2020, the average Filipino consumer on GrabFood tried approximately 2-3 different restaurants in a month with variety of food and value for money as the main considerations.
With these results, Grab seeks to empower more business owners with key information on how to reach and attract more loyal customers to their brands. As the “Grab Next: Food Trends Report 2020/2021″ shares data and insights to its community, it also aims to help them plot down their next steps to innovate further and grow their business more on the Grab platform, anchoring strategies on the market’s ever-evolving consuming behavior.
The report also furthered the discussion with suggested in-app tools merchants can experiment with, tips on how to boost sales online, the value cloud kitchens have introduced to the Grab ecosystem, and so much more.
You can read the full Grab Next: Food Trends Report 2020/2021 here.
The story was first published on September 10, 2021.