DiDi starts new kitchen service for restaurants
Recently, DiDi is developing a new overseas catering project.
According to Wen Luo, general manager of R-Lab, the team is still at the small-scale pilot stage. The team mainly explores the overseas food delivery business. It is currently operating in Mexico, Japan, and Brazil. Different from the traditional take-out models, the goal of this project is to explore self-developed dishes and provide dishes to offline restaurants.
Not long ago, DiDi Food beat rivals like Uber eats and Mexico’s Rappi when Mexico’s “TV Novelas” selected the best food delivery platform, ranking first with a four-star rating.
The seemingly simple takeout service requires very complex planning and computing capabilities. For example, the price of each order of takeout is different due to factors such as meal expenses, delivery fees, subsidies, etc. The delivery fee, in turn, is affected by elements like basic delivery fees, delivery tools, delivery mileage, delivery area, delivery punctuality, etc. The nature of the takeout business is not that different from the operation logic of the ride-hailing service, using a capacity platform to dispatch the capacity of transporting something or someone from point A to point B at the fastest speed.
R-Lab empowers DiDi Chuxing’s superior capabilities onto the food delivery platform to break into the overseas food delivery market. R-Lab is a first-level department of Didi founded in 2017. The team houses over 500 people. The main outputs are products and technology, responsible for exploring and incubating new businesses for Didi.
The most distinctive fruit of R-Lab is DiDi Food. Using DiDi Food in Mexico as an example, it beats the local food delivery platform Rappi with experience, showing off the product localization ability of the platform.
