HungryPanda LTD is a London-headquartered specialist food delivery platform that connects consumers with businesses selling authentic Chinese food and groceries. HungryPanda’s founders launched the company in March 2017 with a vision: To become a global leader in the specialist food delivery industry. Four years later, HungryPanda has operations in 60 major cities across ten countries. The company consistently posted triple-digit annual volume growth and expects the trend to continue in the years ahead.

Navigating the Pandemic-Powered Surge in Online Food Deliveries

Covid-19 made e-commerce a necessity. As businesses and consumers around the world navigated lockdowns and supply chain disruptions last year, online platforms provided a much-needed lifeline, forever changing the way we transact. The pandemic accelerated the shift to e-commerce by as much as six years, according to some estimates.

Online grocery and food takeout deliveries posted stellar growth last year, and HungryPanda was among the companies that experienced a surge in demand. The surge presented challenges and opportunities in equal measure. Making the most of them required the right technology partner.

Scaling to Meet Demand Amid the Pandemic

Central to HungryPanda’s success is its strategic partnership with Alibaba Cloud: “We didn’t come this far on our own,” says Jon Hsu, General Manager of HungryPanda LTD. “We have a great team, great investors and great partners. Alibaba Cloud is one of those great partners. Our platform is running 100 percent on Alibaba Cloud. Their cloud-native solutions and global coverage provided us with really important resources and tools that enabled us to expand our business on a global scale.”

Cloud Native from Day One

Growing the business across ten countries on four continents was no easy task. Yet, by partnering with Alibaba Cloud, HungryPanda avoided the scalability and elasticity challenges that most e-commerce companies face when expanding across borders. Alibaba Cloud’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions provided the perfect foundations for growth. In turn, HungryPanda was able to optimize its services to meet evolving customer needs.

Never was the power of this partnership clearer than during the Covid-19 pandemic: “There was a surge in demand for app-based delivery services,” Jon says. “In some cities, we experienced a 600 percent increase in volume. That required allocating resources to manage delivery times, communication, quality control and more, all while ensuring that our app ran smoothly. Our partnership with Alibaba Cloud made that possible.”

In many cases, these new consumer habits appear set to stick. In the UK, for instance, more than 50% of people in a recent survey said they plan to continue ordering groceries online after the pandemic. In the US, only 39% of consumers in a different survey said they ordered groceries online before the pandemic. That number doubled during the pandemic, with nearly 57% planning to continue the habit afterwards. All of this bodes well for HungryPanda’s future.

“We believe that our growth is sustainable,” Jon says. “We plan to continue our expansion by gaining market share in existing markets, moving into new markets and rolling out new products and solutions. That’s why we will continue to partner with Alibaba Cloud.”