Zhang Xuhao, CEO of food delivery service provider Ele.me, talked on Tuesday at the 2016 Sina C + Summit about innovation and how cutting edge technologies can be used in food delivery.
“Innovation is in the DNA of Ele.me,” said Zhang.
Founded in 2008, Zhang and his team spent the first three years helping restaurant owners with installing computers and connecting to the internet. However, in the future, Zhang believes that big data and artificial intelligence (AI) will lead the way.
Ele.me created a system called “Napos”, designed for restaurant management. The company also has a delivery system of its own, with over one million registered deliverymen and 140,000 active deliverymen daily.
In addition, Ele.me introduced in July a service that promises “delivery on time”. The “time” has been reduced to an average of 30.88 minutes through data analysis and cloud computing. The team is working to further reduce the time to within 30 minutes. Robots may join the delivery team in the future as well, said Zhang.
In terms of food safety, live-streaming has been introduced to the kitchens of some restaurants – customers are welcome to watch how their food is made.
Having had arrangements in food delivery and supply, Ele.me plans to build a “future restaurant”, a shared kitchen that saves the trouble of renting places for a restaurant of your own.
According to Analysys, China saw its food delivery market reaching nearly RMB 25.3 billion, with Ele.me taking 35.5% of the market share, followed by Meituan delivery (34.2%) and Baidu delivery (21.1%).
Ele.me, now covering 1,000 cities in China with 70 million users, announced on Monday that the platform has achieved a total turnover of RMB 200 million.
(top photo from pixabay.com)