Online canteen service enhances staff retention

With 5.3 million people working in companies (according to the General Statistics Office), only 10% of these using PITO's canteen service. The company is targeting a market that's worth millions of dollars.

The opportunity

“E-commerce allows shoppers to buy whatever they like using the internet. The same goes for lunches or parties at the company,” said Pham Dong Huy, founder of PITO.

This is basically a B2B e-commerce website, connecting businesses to order lunches, corporate parties on demand, and food businesses that are screened according to PITO's regulations.

The business model does not change the current ordering and receiving behavior of customers, but there is a difference. Instead of having to fix a contract with a meal supplier for one year, companies can change it by day at no cost.

In addition, the advantage of shipping costs is also a plus, averaging VND 2,000/serving (50 servings/time). Likewise, with the party booking service, they can quickly choose from many suppliers, including a separate tea party supplier.

PITO has profited from digitalization led by transportation apps like Grab, Gojek, and Baemin with a food business partner since 2015. This speed has been further enhanced since the COVID-19 epidemic- 19 should have no difficulties connecting.

They understand that the geographical location of the restaurant model also limits the number of customers they reach, so spending 20% ​​of revenue per order arising from PITO is still better than nothing. On the other hand, so far in Vietnam, there are not many platforms connecting businesses and food establishments like PITO, so the main concern of this group is to reduce food waste.

A study published in Green Queen in 2019 found that countries in Southeast Asia generate 25% of global food waste each year. This is largely due to the unpredictability of food businesses' sales needs. Therefore, these units have to incur more costs to store or import goods.

Toine Timmermans, Program Director of Sustainable Food Chains at Wageningen University & Research, cites reports from 700 food businesses in 17 countries that reducing food loss helps them improve profits 14 times and improve relationships with customers and suppliers.

For PITO Catering party bookings and PITO Cloud meal orders, clients will close with restaurants at least 24 hours in advance. This optimizes expenses and material ordering by predicting sales demand. Finally, PITO is an e-commerce strategy that requires a lot of money to establish a delivery staff, but Mr. Huy says the business has it under control.

Because lunch delivery operates at a fixed time from 10-12 hours a day, it is not difficult to arrange delivery staff, the company currently has 5 service staff and expands according to the number of orders. Revenue generated from the platform will be transferred by PITO to business establishments at a frequency of every 2 weeks. "We have not been late for payment in the past four years," Huy said.

Many businesses see quality meal options as part of employee retention. Photo: TL.

Passion for chain stores

Huy belongs to the 2nd generation of startups in Vietnam, who have worked in large enterprises or startups, entering the market with customized solutions according to the needs of the domestic market. This group has been active in the past 3 years and is the preferred category of investment funds for startups, accounting for more than 40% of funding deals since 2019.

Since the 1990s, Huy's family sold office meaks. Owning a restaurant franchise and cooking are additional passions. He quit marketing after almost a decade. He built two Cocorico French-style rotisserie chicken restaurants in 2017. During a conference in Singapore, he saw that business lunches in ready-to-eat trays were popular, so he went to Vietnam to try to adapt Cocorico's meals to the tray and focus more on literary promotion. room. From that, PITO—Party in the Office—was formed.

In 2018, office party reservations for yearly events, employee birthdays, and other events surged, thus PITO expanded its Caterer branch in District 2 (HCMC) with a 300 m2 kitchen. The development pace is quite quick. In the last season of Christmas and New Year, there are days with a maximum capacity of 4 parties, each with 200-300 attendees, but still receives many order requests. Even if I expanded, I couldn't fulfill demand. "There must be another way," Huy remarked.

He realized the great potential to develop PITO into a “Corporate Catering Marketplace” - the first e-commerce platform to order food for businesses in Vietnam. So the company moved all online, only doing the connection task, the experience of managing a food business in the past 2 years was used to create a set of rules for partner screening.

PITO offers almost 6,000 meals or parties every day. PITO fed almost 10,000 employees of 70 firms on March 8. Lazada, Shopee, VNG, MoMo, and Grab are all devoted PITO clients. More than 300 food company partners follow the Company's high food safety requirements.

PITO's technology system (including 3 products PITO Catering, online large meal ordering for PITO Xpress group and PITO Cloud Canteen) is now built to replace most of the basic stages involved in direct communication. contact with people such as choosing type, menu, unit price, address, decoration, note food allergies, leaving a review, issuing a VAT invoice, choosing the type of environmental protection box...

Before that, Huy asked friends for their ideas because first, Grab can join if the market is big enough, and second, to destroy the link between enterprises. Food business is hard since both sides have personal interests. He thinks the industry is still large and many companies regard decent food alternatives as staff retention. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, 80% of office workers value lunch perks, which affects morale and corporate involvement.

Moreover, party booking and lunch needs are easily decided expenses in the business, since it is not more than VND 100 million per month. “Otherwise, the PITO Catering service - our on-demand party booking service - would not have grown at 100% monthly, with an average value of about VND 20 million/service order," he said.

As for the entry of big players, it's a must in an attractive market, it's just a matter of who moves faster and understands customers better. Startups have the advantage of turning around faster than businesses of scale. “We hope to create the habit of ordering 1 week, even a month in advance instead of 24 hours of business as it is now. What I am most interested in is that the solutions from PITO will change the perception of businesses about the value of employee meals, saving everyone time in ordering food,” said Huy.