Pandas Sleep, Eat, And Deliver

Foodpanda’s CEO Jakob Angele shares his fascination with q-commerce and how, despite the numbers aspect of it, it’s all about the heart

- Alfieyah Abdullah

The roads have been alive with colour recently. Specifically in the familiar nuances of pink, turquoise and green. Food delivery companies have been working around the clock to bring us our morning coffees, quick lunches and lazy dinners, forming a nascent industry growingly referred to as Quick Commerce or q-commerce. For seven years, Jakob Angele helmed the leading food and grocery delivery platform, Foodpanda, and saw the business evolve from restaurant deliveries to include q-commerce: superfast delivery of anything to our doorstep.

Prior to entering the food delivery industry, Angele was a project manager at McKinsey Company, where he focused on management strategy. He joined foodpanda in 2014 and moved to Singapore the year after to oversee operations in the Asian markets. When Foodpanda was acquired by Delivery Hero, he found himself kneedeep in organisational changes and restructuring. It was a new chapter in the business. Since his first days, Foodpanda has grown from 300 orders a day in Malaysia to more than 2 million orders a day across 12 markets.

At a time of pandemic lockdowns and restrictions, Angele saw an opportunity for Foodpanda to help the local communities by providing reliable and safe access to fresh food through home deliveries. foodpanda led a new era of e-commerce in Asia, growing to 450 per cent year on year in the q-commerce verticals. Today, Foodpanda has Asia’s largest network of cloud grocery stores and micro warehouses providing consumers with on-demand access to over 4,000 grocery and household products, deliveried within 25 minutes.