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HungryGoWhere CEO Frank Young. Photo credit: HungryGoWhere.

Singapore’s food delivery market doesn’t seem like the most inviting one to enter. Sure, Singaporeans love good food. But the Lion City remains a small market of about 5.4 million people. Between the likes of FoodPanda, Deliveroo, UberEats, and local players like Grain, the market appears quite locked down.

Together with FoodPanda’s restaurants, HungryGoWhere will offer more than 2,000 options to users.

Singaporean restaurant discovery website HungryGoWhere thinks it can make a difference there, however. The company announced today it has partnered with food delivery firm FoodPanda to add online food ordering and delivery to its list of services. It’s also starting a takeaway service, where a user can order online at a restaurant ahead of time, then swing by the place and pick up their food.

As one of Singapore’s startup success stories, HungryGoWhere might just be in a good position to do it. HungryGoWhere currently has over 1 million unique monthly visitors and over 5 million page views. According to SimilarWeb, it gets more traction than competitors like European startup Quandoo and local and regional players Burpple, Eatigo, and Offpeak.

In FoodPanda, it saw a partner of “comparable clout,” HungryGoWhere CEO Frank Young explains. The company’s established delivery network and domain expertise made it a good fit for HungryGoWhere’s venture into this new space.

Founded in 2004, HungryGoWhere was acquired in 2012 by SingTel Digital Media (a subsidiary of telco SingTel).

“We are working toward being the portal that fully satisfies your food cravings,” says Frank, who joined the company early last year.

Long reach

Frank reasons that if consumers are looking for food recommendations online, it’s important to service that need immediately. Besides actually booking a table at a restaurant and going there, today’s consumers want online ordering and delivery. So why send them to different websites to do it?

HungryGoWhere has worked for the past three months to integrate FoodPanda’s data and delivery tech into its own platform, enabling users to order and pay on HungryGoWhere. A FoodPanda delivery person picks up the order and brings it over.

Adjusting HungryGoWhere’s tech to allow for these extra features wasn’t too much of a challenge – the current platform could accommodate them with some tailoring. The team added an ordering system and a payment platform and it was good to go, Frank says.

See: HungryGoWhere still going places after acquisition, says inSing CEO

The business partnership between HungryGoWhere and FoodPanda doesn’t involve an investment from one side into the other, Frank confirms.

“With these four aspects of our brand – discovery, reservations, delivery, and takeaway – we believe we fulfill the full needs of the consumer,” says Frank.

The Singaporean company currently has more than 900 restaurants on its platform and is about to sign up another 100 that specialize in takeaway. Together with FoodPanda’s approximately 1,000 eateries, it will be able to offer more than 2,000 options to users. In return for its part in the deal, FoodPanda gets more traffic on its delivery services, a larger “digital footprint,” as Frank puts it.

HungryGoWhere doesn’t share any revenue numbers. It currently employs a staff of 30 in Singapore.

Seat at the table

When it comes to facing other food delivery players in Singapore’s limited sandbox, Frank doesn’t sound too worried. “Our domain expertise is our users – in no stretch of the imagination are we a niche market,” he says. He figures a large enough percentage of HungryGoWhere’s user base would choose the convenience of performing all these actions on one website.

HungryGoWhere isn’t really interested in competing with other food delivery services.

Other than that, the company isn’t really interested in competing directly with them – that would potentially mean developing its own delivery fleets and logistics system. “That’s a nightmare in itself. I’m glad the market is mature enough to have all these services,” he adds, noting that HungryGoWhere could potentially partner with more of them down the line.

HungryGoWhere also operates in Malaysia, where FoodPanda is also present. Frank does not comment on whether the partnership will extend there as well. He does say HungryGoWhere would like to add delivery and takeaway features in that market too.

FoodPanda was a Rocket Internet startup until late last year, when its global business was sold to fellow Germany-headquartered online food delivery service Delivery Hero.

See: 5 possible reasons for Rocket Internet’s surprise sell-off of Foodpanda

FoodPanda operates in 22 countries, including several markets in Southeast Asia, although it chose to pull out of Indonesia and Vietnam under pressure from local players. Its most recent funding round came in May 2015, when it raised US$100 million from investors including Goldman Sachs.

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