Students’ lazy lunch provides food for thought and fires China’s meal-ordering platform, ele.me
The mainland's leading online platform for ordering meals handles two million orders every day in 260 cities across the country
Seven years ago, two graduate students at Shanghai Jiao Tong University were so busy playing computer games in their dormitory one day that they ordered lunch from a nearby restaurant.
That night, inspired by their laziness, Kang Jia and Zhang Xuhao chatted until the early hours about setting up their own food delivery business.
I believe that in five years you will see fewer and fewer people opening restaurants, but more offering more diversified door-to-door services
Yet they were inspired to take action immediately – contracting the delivery services of several restaurants near their campus, sending out brochures, and hiring a couple of staff to take phone orders and several others to carry out the deliveries.
Sometimes they even carried out deliveries themselves to the similarly lazy students at the small campus. How times have changed.
Today their company, ele.me – which means “are you hungry” in Chinese – is the mainland’s leading online platform for ordering meals. They handle two million orders every day in 260 cities across the mainland.
Internet giants such as Tencent, JD.com and state-run retailer Beijing Hualian Group, have shown a strong appetite for ele.me, too, after providing some of the five rounds of investment totalling US$500 million (HK$605 million).