F&B Archives - MARKETECH APAC

Hong Kong – Chinese catering group Fulum Group Holdings has entered into a strategic cooperation agreement with Sunpark Holdings, an F&B corporation in Japan, to further expand its diversified F&B offerings.

In this new partnership, Fulum Group will introduce multiple of Sunpark’s F&B brands into the Hong Kong food scene. These brands are ‘Takagi Coffee’ that provides specialty coffee and pancakes; ‘Karubi Kazan’ that offers handcrafted barbeque meat rice bowls; and ‘Hachikian’ that specialises in chicken dishes.

The restaurants will be located in the city centre with high foot traffic to attract the younger generation.

With Sunpark already eyeing Hong Kong as its next destination for expansion, its partnership with Fulum will materialise this plan. Meanwhile, Fulum’s cooperation with Sunpark is expected to further diversify the group’s restaurant portfolio.

This strategic agreement is the result of an initiative organised by the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office (Tokyo) and InvestHK. The Hong Kong F&B Mission aims to business match and network the F&B corporations in Hong Kong and Japan.

Samuel Yeung, CEO of the Fulum Group, said, “Hong Kong people have always favoured Japanese cuisine. Sunpark offers various specialty F&B brands and has decades of experience and insights of the industry, which is what Fulum is trying to achieve with our diversified restaurant mix. We are very excited about this strategic cooperation. Looking forward, we will continue to closely monitor latest trends and hope to introduce more of Sunpark’s brands in hopes of offering even more gourmet options in Hong Kong.

Ken Takagi, CEO of Sunpark, also shared, “Sunpark is committed to bring quality Japanese food at highest level of hospitality from Japan to the world, one store at a time. We are honoured to partner with a strong partner like Fulum Group. This cements our relationship as family.”

Meanwhile, Leo Tze, acting principal Hong Kong economic and trade representative for Tokyo, commented, “Today I am happy to witness the signing of the first deal resulting from this mission, namely this partnership agreement between Sunpark and Fulum. I wish them every success in their business in Hong Kong. I believe this would be the good start and hope to hear more good news amid ongoing partnership discussion of the participant companies.”

Also speaking on the partnership, Alpha Lau, director-general of investment promotion at Invest Hong Kong, said, “When foreign and local players work together, in a strategic partnership like that of Fulum and Sunpark, I believe the synergy will only mean even more opportunities and growth potential for both sides. This partnership is the result of our collaborated programme with colleagues at Tokyo ETO. Going forward, Invest Hong Kong will continue to work with ETOs around the world to assist more Mainland and foreign companies to set up their base in Hong Kong.”

Jakarta, Indonesia – Indonesia-based culinary multi-brand startup Hangry has announced its latest equity and debt funding of US$22m, making it to US$35m in total with series A equity funding last year. The equity funding portion was led by Hangry’s new investor Journey Capital Partners, with participation from Orzon Ventures, Sassoon Investment Corporation (SassCorp), and other existing investors including Alpha JWC Ventures. Hangry plans to use the funding to drive toward business strategy expansion by acquiring other winning F&B brands, building its own brands, and maximizing nationwide expansion.

Hangry is a fast-growing culinary startup with a cloud kitchen and multi-brand concept. Hangry first opened in November 2019 and was built with a mission to provide great, easily accessible, yet affordable F&B options. Since its establishment, the company has successfully launched multiple brands with large culinary varieties, such as Moon Chicken by Hangry which is a Korean-inspired fried chicken, San Gyu by Hangry which boasts authentic Japanese cuisine, and Ayam Koplo by Hangry, a new take on various traditional chicken delicacies.

Hangry has, in fact, already made its first acquisition recently – Accha – which delivers Indian soul food in Greater Jakarta and West Java. Established in the same year as Hangry, Accha offers Indian localized Indian cuisine at affordable price points. The company said this marks its invite to other winning F&B brands to join the company and build and expand the brands together.

“We always aspire to build brands with gourmet-quality dishes that can be enjoyed around the world. Originating from Indonesia, Hangry will not only build its own brand but also acquire the other winning F&B brands,” said Hangry Co-founder and CEO Abraham Viktor.

Viktor shared that adding brands has always been in the pipeline of the company with multi-brand and multi-channel as its core concept. In addition to that, he also hinted at their ambitious global plans.

“Hangry has successfully built the business focus in the delivery service. Not stopping there, we want to present our winning brands to people globally, making their moments delightful. That’s why we also acquire the other F&B brands to have multiple winning brands, so we can achieve the vision faster as well as to cater [to] different tastes and interests,” said Viktor.

Subsequent to the fundraising process, Hangry’s target expansion is region-wide starting from 2024. The company said the strategy will include building more brands that are distinctive yet able to serve a wide range of customer targets.

From 2019 to date, Hangry has opened more than 70 outlets. With Accha joining the house, this brings their managed brands to five.

Last 2 December, MARKETECH APAC, in partnership with Adzymic, gathered marketing leaders from top brands in the Philippines to discuss the future of personalization in marketing in 2022.

Moderated by Marilyn Romero-Ventenilla, senior director for communications and marketing at Teleperformance Philippines, the panel roped in Allenie Caccam, head of marketing of AirAsia Philippines; Anvey Factora, the head of marketing communications, e-commerce and retail at Canon Philippines; and Mark De Joya, chief operating officer of Max’s Restaurant.

Data – leveraging it to learn and adapt to the nuances of the consumer – this is what all marketers agree as the sureshot personalization strategy that will sail brands in the right direction, no matter what the changes will be in 2022.

Factora of Canon Philippines said in the panel that planning way too ahead would turn counterproductive to the situation at hand since the consumer is rapidly changing in tandem with the fast shifts in the pandemic. Coming up with multiple strategies then would be the best approach.

“I think the best approach or strategy is to come up with multiple strategies that you can realistically activate in this constantly evolving world that we all have right now because at the end of the day, if you plan in advance, maybe a year, it may not be as effective as it could be in the next three weeks or two weeks because of all the lockdowns happening, because of all these pandemic variants coming into the picture,” said Factora in the panel.

When the pandemic struck in 2020, Canon Philippines greeted a boulder of a challenge with the creative and imaging industry being one of the badly hit industries. Since local travel came to a halt and events all pivoted to virtual, there had been less reasons for people to buy and invest in imaging products.

Caccam of AirAsia Philippines, on the other hand, shared what the airline industry had to deal with in order to retain consumers amid shut local and international travel. Being a highly regulated sector, Caccam shared that answering to multiple stakeholders became a top challenge for AirAsia. Aside from thinking of ways to keep the airline in consumers’ top-of-mind, it also inevitably carried the responsibility to build up the confidence of travelers as travel gradually reopens.

“So when the pandemic hit, everything was constantly changing; from safety protocols to travel regulations, imagine the coordination that needed to happen for us to personalize our marketing efforts. It was definitely a challenge.”

Max’s restaurant, a well-known local F&B brand in the Philippines, meanwhile, was thrust fast into digital transformation during the pandemic. Its COO Mark De Joya on the panel shared that from being an analog brand, it has become something that is very much reliant on digital fulfillment.

Leveraging data acquisition in 2022

With the consumer now becoming more unpredictable due to the rapid changes in lifestyle, it demands brands be more granular and targeted in their approaches; and marketing leaders agree that this can be achieved by continuously obtaining real-time data.

Caccam said, “I think personalization based on data will help us offer the right product at the right time [and] at the right price. So this is hard but by listening to customer pain points from different channels and combining it with data trends, I think brands can stay relevant.”

Moving forward in the pandemic, consumers would be zeroing in on brands that bring greater convenience considering the inevitable distress the current situation is causing them. With this, Caccam also believes being a one-stop-shop for customers would be a crucial determinant of how they choose what brands to trust.

“So it’s really creating that personalized trust and being a one-stop-shop for your customers especially because I’m in the airline industry and you know our product is basically really good service, so I think that’s one personalization strategy that I would stick with coming into 2022 which is a recovery period for our industry,” said Caccam.

This is also something that De Joya agrees with, especially that Max’s is part of a larger group together with local and franchised F&B brands.

“Personalization comes from having more and more parts to stitch together and with the array of brands we have, covering separate cohorts and different territorial strengths [has grown in importance],” said De Joya.

De Joya adds how the current times present a good opportunity to experiment combining brands, or for that matter, services together in order to create a new value for consumers.

“We have such a great opportunity here to blend our brands together and make sure that if I’m not eating Sinigang today and I want to eat pizza tomorrow, and I want donuts on the weekend, [we] are able to blend together the branded offerings,” said De Joya.

De Joya further comments, “So our definition of personalization here is understanding that there is more to life than the dish in front of you or the particular dish that we’re craving. It’s an integrated ecosystem of different brands which leads to several service platforms that we had to come up with…just to be able to make sure that we’re all able to offer that variety.”

While on the maturity of data acquisition, De Joya says, “I think [data] is something that we have truly invested many resources into. We really [are] able to identify the nuances in the behavior of our customers now not just the basic stuff like frequency, recency, [or] basket size but even trying to get the nuances [such as] what sort of dishes do they favor [and] what are the cross-brand usages that they have.”

With this, Factora agrees, “Data remains to be king when you [personalize] campaigns. You have to understand really how your customers are, how the data would be helpful to that campaign. I think the best approach in terms of creating a holistic strategy towards personalization is number one, properly understand your data. Having the right platform is important [together with the] right message and right channel.”

The panel was part of the webinar What’s NEXT: Digital Marketing in the Philippines which was held last 2 December 2021. Register here to gain on-demand access.

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The article is published as part of MARKETECH APAC’s thought leadership series What’s NEXT. This features marketing leaders sharing their marketing insights and predictions for the upcoming year. The series aims to equip marketers with actionable insights to future-ready their marketing strategies.

If you are a marketing leader and have insights that you’d like to share with regards to the upcoming trends and practices in marketing, please reach out to [email protected] for an opportunity to have your thought-leadership published on the platform.

Manila, Philippines – TikTok in the Philippines is moving to support would-be entrepreneurs through the launch of its new campaign, ‘’Negosyo Mo Na Yan’. Negosyo is a Tagalog term for business, and the campaign is aimed at helping Filipinos cope financially in these trying times by empowering them to launch their own businesses.

Through this campaign, TikTok hopes to equip aspiring entrepreneurs with the tools and basic knowledge they need to jumpstart their business ventures. During the pandemic, a lot of beginning and closeted entrepreneurs came out of their shells with online marketplaces seeing an unprecedented surge during the period. With this, content platforms and e-commerce platforms themselves have been launching online initiatives to teach budding business owners to navigate and foray into online selling.

‘Negosyo Mo Na Yan’ will focus solely on food-related businesses, largely because, according to the short video platform, most of the thriving local businesses born during the pandemic are centered around food.

The campaign will kick off with ‘Negosyo Week’ from 27 September to 3 October 2021. During this period, a series of masterclasses will be hosted by different TikTok partners via TikTok Live. Each session will last for 2 hours where viewers will gain insights and information relevant to a food entrepreneur’s journey. Partner speakers include GCash, Puregold, Abenson, Canva, and When In Manila Food as well as Globe.

This will be followed by a #NegosyoRecipe challenge from 4 October to 21 October 2021, where participants can win amazing prizes, including appliances and tools that can help them start their businesses. In order to join, users need to upload their best negosyo recipe videos on TikTok using the hashtag #NegosyoRecipe. TikTok will then select 10 creators from among all the participants who will move on to the next round.

Shortlisted creators will be given the exclusive chance to develop their negosyo ideas, and improve their business models through one-on-one mentoring sessions. The challenge will culminate with a business pitch, where the final 10 creators will present their ideas to a panel of judges composed of respected entrepreneurs and experts from the food industry such as RJ Ledesma of Mercato Group, celebrity chef Marvin Agustin, and Mark del Rosario of Let’s Eat Pare.

After the pitch, the three creators with the most promising business ideas will be awarded as winners. Along with the business-building tools, one grand winner will also be entitled to a six-month mentorship with Marvin Agustin, which includes a spot in his cloud kitchen, The Secret Kitchen.

As the leading short video platform, TikTok has been ramping up its content strategy in order to include conversations relevant to society. Its Singaporean counterpart has recently launched a livestream series dedicated to anchoring the discussion on mental health awareness.

Philippines – There’s no doubt that more than just being what used to be an exciting past-time and a convenient solution, online food deliveries have now become the crucial element this pandemic for both consumers and business owners, with strict national protocols enforcing everyone to stay within the premises of their own home.

Grab, the top ride-hailing app in Southeast Asia, that soon grew into a superapp has released its first-ever ‘Food Trends Report’ in the Philippines, drawing insights from its food delivery business GrabFood for the period of 2019-2021.

For starters, the study shows that during this period, food delivery has also served to be Filipinos’ go-to solution in battling traffic and road problems. Pre-pandemic, these were already in Filipinos’ top dilemmas, and even now that times have changed, Filipinos are dealing with them the same even amid less opportunities for cars to roam freely in the streets.

In the study which was conducted by NielsenIQ, it shows that among the top reasons Filipinos order food delivery in 2020 is so that they don’t need to worry about traffic or parking. This is together with Filipnos’ desire to satisfy cravings for food they can’t cook, and due to simply not having the time to cook.

Grab Philippines_Filipinos — Infographic from Grab Philippines

Due to the demands of family that has been augmented by the ongoing pandemic, the report found that it is families who have children that order the most from food delivery, with 65% of them belonging to the 25-44 year-old bracket.

With Filipinos looking to delivery as a save from the rigorous preparations of their favorite dishes; pizza, cake, and pasta were found to be some of the favorite food items that Filipinos like to search on the Grab app. In fact, pizza was searched 6 million times on GrabFood in 2020.

What’s more, despite it being a staple only for celebrations, Filipinos’ orders for cake also grew by 2.6 times in the year 2020 compared to the previous year.

In terms of the time of the day, it seems that it is immaterial for Filipino foodies on what time they’d prefer to put in their orders, where most orders were made for dinner, lunch, and ‘merienda’ or afternoon time. However, in 2020, Filipinos were shown to spend more on breakfast with a 35% increase in basket size for the said part of the day.

On top of Filipinos’ delivery behavior, the average Filipino consumer is trying approximately 2-3 different restaurants in a month in 2020, with ‘variety of food’ and ‘value for money’ as their main considerations.

With Grab’s report originally dedicated to bring commercial awareness to F&B merchants, the report reveals that most of all, more F&B brands are giving food delivery a shot, with the number of monthly active merchants in GrabFood increasing by 60% in 2020.

Aside from research insights, the report by Grab also includes content on the state of the food delivery business as a whole in the country as well as tips on digital marketing for F&B businesses.

Statistics were derived from Grab’s internal database between 2019–2020. The research conducted also includes interviews with food industry professionals, restaurateurs, consumer surveys, and focus groups.

Malaysia – Food & Beverage company Loob Holding in Malaysia, which owns the local bubble tea brand, Tealive, has announced a new head of digital marketing, Fabian Khaw.

Khaw previously comes from smart urban development in Malaysia, i-City, where he held the position of digital marketing manager. In the said role, he oversaw the digital portal of i-City’s theme park, and was responsible for managing the theme park’s ad spend to bring in 6- to 7- digit RM revenue.

For the new position at Loob Holding, Khaw shared to MARKETECH APAC that he will be providing the vision and leadership for the strategic development of all the brands’ digital marketing landscape and to ensure the delivery of an excellent and innovative digital experience to all of its existing and future customers.

Loob Holding owns a wide portfolio of F&B brands. Aside from Tealive, it also manages brands Bask Bear Coffee, Gindaco, Define Food, KoKoKai, and SodaXpress. Khaw will be handling the said entire portfolio to drive its digital presence.

Khaw shared that he is charged with the responsibility of enhancing the omnichannel strategy of the brands to allow more touchpoints for the end users. Besides this, he will also be planning the necessary infrastructure to capture first-party data in preparing for a cookieless world.

“I am super excited to work closely with the leadership team and marketing team for the next phase of growth for Tealive and the other brands under Loob Holdings. I look forward to driving the digital front and unlocking further growth through new and existing channels.,” said Khaw.

He added, “In this current economic situation where retail is no longer the main channel of purchase, people want the same self-service experience from a touch of their fingertips, and we can achieve that through a strong digital infrastructure.”

With digitization as the top driver of brands and consumer companies in the current period’s physically-deprived lifestyle, Khaw said that the key challenge for digital marketing teams, specifically for F&B brands, is setting clear tracking and measurement of the performance for every dollar spent in advertising when it comes to driving customers to the retail front and also to the delivery partners.

“As a marketeer, having this information is crucial for us to determine the most effective channel to acquire customers. With that said, I see an equal opportunity for brands, from big to small, new or old, to capitalize on many social media platforms that didn’t exist 5 to 10 years ago to reach the end users,” said Khaw.

Khaw will be reporting directly to Loob Holding’s CEO, Bryan Loo.

In line with the ongoing pandemic situation, Loo said they see the need to strengthen their digital presence and to create an omnichannel strategy that will allow for customers to reach their brands in any method that is most convenient to them.

“We want someone who not only leads us on the digital front, but also to have someone who shares our Loob core values which are teamwork, entrepreneurial, honesty, and passion. Fabian brings both of that in a single package,” said Loo.

Singapore – GrabFood has officially launched on ShopBack, enabling 1.5 million ShopBack users in Singapore to enjoy cashback on their GrabFood orders. Users can now save a little extra when they are placing a food delivery order from their favorite F&B outlets, including McDonalds, Playmade, and Din Tai Fung.

To access these rewards, users have to first launch the ShopBack app, then type in “GrabFood” in the search bar or click on “GrabFood” under the New Stores on ShopBack section. This will redirect the user from the ShopBack app to the GrabFood app, allowing for the cashback to be tracked. The user should have the latest version of Grab installed.

The pandemic has resulted in many preferring to consume their meals from the safety of home, and this partnership will help to facilitate the shift in consumer behavior from restaurant dine-in to pick up, takeaway, and delivery.
Joel Leong, Co-founder of ShopBack.

“We are thrilled to add GrabFood to our growing line-up of merchants. The pandemic has resulted in many preferring to consume their meals from the safety of home, and this partnership will help to facilitate the shift in consumer behavior from restaurant dine-in to pick up, takeaway, and delivery. We have also received many requests from our users to on-board GrabFood, and today, we are happy to be able to make this a reality and bring even more cashback options for our users,” said Joel Leong, Co-founder of ShopBack.

A recent report by Facebook and Bain & Company found that there has been a shift to value-for-money purchasing across Southeast Asia as conservatism sets in, as 57% of survey respondents cited ‘value’ among their top-three purchasing considerations. This is more pronounced in Singapore, where around 70% cite ‘value’ as a top consideration.

“Singaporeans are passionate about food and appreciate the convenience. Also, true to our kiasu (fear of losing) nature, we never want to miss out on a good deal and we are constantly seeking out value. As such, this partnership with GrabFood has all the right ingredients for success,” added Leong.

“As one of the leading digital lifestyle apps in Singapore, we are always finding new ways to create more value for our customers with every dollar they spend on our products and services. We are therefore pleased to be able to launch GrabFood on ShopBack. At a time when consumers increasingly seek out apps and platforms that empower their digital lifestyles, we are confident that this partnership can serve their evolving needs,” said Gillian Ang, Head of Marketing for Grab Singapore.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – As Malaysia has stepped into the recovery stage of the Movement Control Order (MCO), more service industries have shifted stronger focus to gear up their digital avenue to increase their revenues that were badly affected since the nationwide lockdown earlier in March.

While other restaurants and food operators turn to online food delivery partnership to make up for the cutback faced due to Social Distancing and limited operational hours that the government has outlined, Tamarind Restaurants decided to take another turn by launching CiaoChow, Malaysia’s first virtual gourmet food court that allows food lovers to order a variety of cuisines from the different virtual kiosks within the CiaoChow food court.

“We always pride ourselves on our brand values, high standards, and quality of products and services long before the lockdown due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Hence, we decided to launch CiaoChow to ensure our loyal customers will continue to enjoy our food at the comfort of their own home, while practicing safety protocols. Furthermore, the food varieties featured in the CiaoChow platform are not available in our group of physical restaurants, all menus from CiaoChow are specially crafted with delivery durability in mind,” said Federico Asaro, Founder of Tamarind Restaurants (pictured). “By running end-to-end online orders in-house, we can ensure the high quality of our food in our environmentally-friendly packaging is well-maintained while promoting our brands to new and existing customers”.

“Our clientele comes from a group of people who appreciate the finer things in life and they are conscious about ethical food business, generally those of the middle to high-income bracket aged 30 and above. We work directly with fishermen who supply our fresh seafood. Our vegetables are primarily organic and sourced from a lowland and highland farm in Malaysia. Our meat comes from cage-free poultry and grass-fed cattle farms that apply humane sustainable practices. Therefore, it is important for us to maintain the quality of our online order service just like we do at physical restaurants,” Asaro added.

Speaking further on CiaoChow, Asaro had hoped that the success of the online platform will allow their group of companies to sustain their business and operations to continue to retain their manpower as many from similar industries have gone either downsized or discontinued operations permanently. CiaoChow also receives orders from its official Facebook and Instagram channel to cater to the more social media savvy demography.

“These kitchens do not operate as physical restaurants for walk-in customers. We hope by setting up these kitchens, we will be able to ensure the quality of our food and the efficiency of our delivery service within a 6km radius from each kitchen.

There are further plans to add other brands within Ciaochow’s food court, one is to serve a diet-focused clientele by allowing customers to plan their weekly dietary needs for delivery to multiple addresses, work, home, and anywhere in between. Asaro is currently making plans to bring the brand to the Middle East in the near future.