Deal focus: Indonesia food delivery goes daily

In Indonesia’s increasingly well-trod digital food services segment, the concept of the “daily food segment” remains a vast white space. This is a neighbourhood-level dark kitchen paradigm, where customer orders tend to be repeated, allowing service providers to streamline food procurement and delivery operations.

Uena is touted as the only company doing this. Last week, it confirmed raising a seed round of undisclosed size led by East Ventures and Trihill Capital, describing the daily food segment in Indonesia as a USD 90bn market almost completely populated by unorganised street vendors.

The company is said to be able to sell meals as cheap as USD 1.00 within 15 minutes by keeping the delivery radii around kitchens under 1.5 kilometres. The model has proven to encourage high-frequency ordering directly on the Uena app or via WhatsApp, rather than through separate delivery platforms, effectively lowering fee-related costs for end-users.

“We believe that those factors will act as a flywheel that will reinforce one another. The high volume, hyperlocal, and direct sales channel will have a snowball effect to be stronger perpetually as Uena grows,” said Jordy Tenka, a senior investment associate at East.

Uena has opened seven kitchens in Jakarta and counts its deliveries in the thousands; some 300,000 “portions” have been served to date. Most orders come from repeat customers and their orders continue to increase from month to month, according to the company. Less than a year from launch, the most mature kitchens are already break-even operations.

“One of the main factors of going very light is the number of SKUs [stockkeeping units] and the volume on each of the SKUs,” Tenka explained. “Uena is serving daily food with potentially very high volume but a very low number of menus. This enables it to engineer a very efficient and streamlined operation that is replicable and scalable throughout the kitchen locations.”

Uena is now gearing up for an expansion in Jakarta that will leverage low kitchen launch costs and flexibility to use a wide range of available spaces. There are also plans to increase customer repeat orders at different mealtimes throughout the day by adding more menus.

Tenka observes that optimisation and streamlining of such a model requires expertise not only in running a restaurant but also in building menus and related operations from the ground up. This is where the founding talent, COO Roy Yohanes and CEO Alvin Arief (pictured left to right), are hoped to make their mark.

“The founders of Uena have more than 10 years of experience in their previous business, where they knew how to strategically design the operation and what are the levers to increase the efficiency of each of the processes,” Tenka added. “On top of that, data and technology elevate the possibilities of efficiency with data-driven operation and tools such as robotics and IoT [the internet-of-things].”

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Consumer
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Indonesia
• East Ventures
• food & beverage
• TMT
• Logistics