From S&R groceries to hotel food delivery

By Zsarlene B. Chua, Senior Reporter

BEFORE THE COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic, delivery services were slowly, but surely becoming a fixture in the retail space. When the pandemic struck, these services became a necessity instead of just an option as restrictions on movements and gathering made it nearly impossible for people to go to stores physically. And while the need for delivery options cuts across almost every retail segment, it is most apparent in food and groceries.

With the current surfeit of choices, including some stores’ in-house delivery websites, Pick.A.Roo is trying to get its piece of the business by onboarding more “premium” options like delivering food from hotels, to groceries from S&R.

“Even before this pandemic, we spent the entire year researching and planning a fresh concept that bridges the gap between premium offline brands and the growing online segment. With this vision in mind, we decided that to be able to create a unique all-in-one and on-demand premium delivery experience, we had to build our own homegrown startup and redefine the Filipino’s shopping experience,” Kevin Tan, founder of Pick.A.Roo, said in a statement.

Pick.A.Roo is the brainchild of Mr. Tan, CEO of Alliance Global which operates property giant Megaworld and Resorts World Manila, among others, and Crystal Gonzalez, the former country head of Honestbee Philippines.

Honestbee is a Singapore-based online food and grocery service that used to operate in eight markets including the Philippines from 2017 until 2019 when they had to suspend operations except in Singapore.

Pick.A.Roo is the first startup company of AGILE Digital Ventures, the technology and digital investment arm of Megaworld.

In April 2019, Honestbee stopped its Manila operations and, according to a timeline in Pick.A.Roo’s press packet, the idea to create a new food and grocery delivery service started that October.

To date, the service has “over 300 Pick.A.Roo approved brands” including “Apple products, gourmet hotel food, local [Instagram] trends, and Michelin-star restaurants” alongside daily essentials such as groceries and medicine, according to Ms. Gonzalez in a statement.

“When we were thinking of the various products, most of the products we got requests on from our marketing study… a lot of the products people were requesting, all of them are already available in different platforms,” Ms. Gonzalez said during the press launch on July 28 via Google Meet.

This led the team to “curate” brands and products into one “seamless platform,” instead of going to different platforms.

Ms. Gonzalez also said that they charge lower commissions than “other delivery players in the market” and said theirs is “20% and less” when other platforms are said to be charging “25% to 35%.”

Some of the brands already on Pick.A.Roo are S&R Membership Shopping, Central by Landers, Marriott Hotel Manila, Shangri-La at the Fort, Beyond the Box, Las Flores, Tim Ho Wan, The Grid Food Market at Powerplant, Coco Milk Tea, Fresh Options, Hawker Chan, and Kam’s Roast, among others.

Deliveries can be made for stores within a customer’s 10 kilometer radius and Ms. Gonzalez promised to introduce a function where a customer can shop from different stores and put it all in one cart.

The company has also onboarded about 1,400 shoppers and riders. The app will be charging an introductory delivery and shopping rate of P168 (P80 delivery and P88 shopper fee).

The Pick.A.Roo riders and shoppers are said to “earn on a per hour basis,” according to a separate e-mail to BusinessWorld shortly after the launch. But the crew members can earn more through incentives: riders earn an extra fee for “every successful delivery” and shoppers earn extra “for every line item shopped.”

The app is currently on open-beta mode and no full-scale roll-out has been announced yet, but Pick.A.Roo said that the full version should arrive “not too long” after the beta launch.

THE PICK.A.ROO EXPERIENCE
Pick.A.Roo had a by-invitation only beta launch from Aug. 16 to 18 and had 188 users try out the app and this writer was one of them.

(The invitation-only beta access was originally going to be held on Aug. 8 but had to be moved because of the stricter lockdown which was imposed until Aug. 18.)

As someone who previously used Honestbee as her go-to grocery delivery options and was sorely disappointed when it had to cease operations in the Philippines, Pick.A.Roo felt like meeting an old friend — but this friend who used to be a bee turned into a unicorn.

What differed between the two is the presence of premium brands including Joseph Joseph and hotels like Shangri-La at the Fort.

Upon opening the app, stores are already categorized into Groceries, Snacks and Sweets, Premium Eats, Everyday Eats, etc.

The shopping experience was pretty seamless, though I did encounter a few glitches including removing a product from my cart and the app removed a different product, but let’s chalk it up to test run blues.

I bought groceries from S&R and while the beta selection was scanty, navigating through different sections: meat, vegetables, etc., was pretty clear-cut, and I appreciate that they have separate sections for leafy vegetables and root crops.

After checking out, customers are asked to pick what day or time (between 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.) they want their items delivered.

What I did appreciate with Pick.A.Roo is how they give you the option to contact your shopper if there are changes you want to make instead of just waiting for the shopper to call. They did call after they found that several of my items were out of stock.

The app also gives a rundown of the process — from accepting the order, to shopping the order, and finally delivering the order. Payments could be made via credit card and debit card during my beta run.

In all, the app is clear cut and easy to use, bonus points on the overall look of the app — that mint green palette with a unicorn riding a motorcycle is cute. Will I be using it again? Yes, but I will have to wait for the full-app rollout first to see if improvements in both the app and selections have been made.

Pick.A.Roo’s beta version can be downloaded from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

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