The ride-sharing giant says it wants to enable partners to leverage its technology, services and customer database

About a month after it rolled out its on-demand food delivery service GrabFood, Southeast Asian ride-hailing giant Grab today announced its next foray into the food business — grocery delivery.

The new service is a tie-up with Indonesia-based online grocery startup HappyFresh, who is now integrated into Grab’s open platform called GrabPlatform.

GrabPlatform offers a suite of APIs so partnering companies can access Grab’s technology such as logistics (GrabExpress), payments (GrabPay), and user authentication (GrabProfiles).

This is a mutually beneficial strategy for both parties as it allows the partner to also leverage on Grab’s exhaustive customer database and distribution channels —  7.1 million drivers, delivery partners, agents and merchants in 8 countries — across Southeast Asia, and for Grab, it can accelerate its goal to become an “everyday” app, aka the WeChat of Southeast Asia– offering services such as transportation, F&B, courier, and payments, and more.

Also Read: Singapore watchdog says Grab-Uber merger is anti-competitive and may unwind it

GrabFresh will be available as a beta service in Jakarta from this month, and will be available in Thailand and Malaysia by the end of 2018. The service is expected to roll out in other countries in due time.

“Grocery delivery is a huge opportunity in Southeast Asia. From our research, 70 per cent of grocery delivery app users shop at least once per week, and they like to shop from the stores that they are familiar with,” said Guillem Segarra, CEO of HappyFresh, in a press statement. “What they want is for their preferred items to be available and ready, when they want it. GrabFresh already has the widest selection of products compared to other grocery delivery services.”

Besides grocery delivery, Grab is also launching a pre-paid mobile credits top-up service in Indonesia called “Pulsa”.

In line with its aforementioned “everyday app” vision, Grab also announced its intention to build a sizeable volume of editorial and multimedia content on the platform.

These would include reviews of nearby restaurants or shopping malls, curated short films by local producers, and games, and pertinent information for specific occasions such as “what time to break fast during Ramadan, or whether to take a car or bike during the rainy season.”

On the news front, it launched a content partnership with Yahoo so Grab customers can keep up to date with the latest news. This service is available in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines from this month. Other local news partnerships will be announced in other countries soon.

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Image Credit: Grab

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