The online lunch delivery startup is bootstrapped and is looking to raise up to US$100,000 in seed funding
Image credit: Polpa
Polpa is a Bangkok-based online lunch delivery startup targetting mid-to-upper earners in the Thai capital, with a menu of about 18 Mediterranean-inspired homemade dishes that are cooked in-house from ingredients sourced locally.
While the startup soft launched back in November, since March it has been ironing out early wrinkles and ramping up general operations. A mobile app is in the pipeline.
“First and foremost, the food we’re offering is a bit different to what you can get over here [in Bangkok]. We pride ourselves on using high-quality ingredients from ethical suppliers. We’re also coupling this with what we think is quite a convenient ordering mechanism through polpa.co,” Julian Timings, a Co-founder at Polpa, told e27.
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“So people can go on and fairly simply order for multiple days up to two weeks in advance to get their lunch sorted. They don’t have to keep ordering, they can do it all in one go… We handle all the logistics and deliver it to their door,” he added.
Timings and his Co-founder saw a need in the local market for a Polpa-like offering when they were working in ‘more traditional’ but demanding jobs in mid-2014.
They describe the operation as a ‘restaurant without the front’, employing five in-house chefs in a commercial kitchen environment where all the cooking and preparation is done on the same day the food goes out to customers. Currently deliveries are outsourced.
“At the moment we’re expanding. I wouldn’t say exponentially, but we’ve got strong growth month on month. We’re seeing more demand and are trying to feedback with customers as much as possible to find out how we can tweak the service to better suit their needs,” Timings said.
Polpa plans to change up the menu regularly to keep a variety on offer for customers who order one or two weeks worth of meals at a time. It estimates about 40 per cent of its current clientele are expats, with the remaining 60 per cent locals. Biodegradable packaging is part of its wider philosophy around sustainability.
While bootstrapped till now, the startup is looking to raise up to a US$100,000 seed round. It estimates there are two-three million potential customers in its home market, but declined to comment on order numbers, revenue projections or margins.
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“There’s big players in terms of Rocket Internet’s FoodPanda, which does all the restaurant food delivery. But in terms of people creating the food themselves, doing the delivery and the whole e-commerce side of the business, we’re fairly unique in that aspect. There’s not actually very many big players at all,” Timings said.
“We feel there’s an opportunity in Bangkok for sure — Bangkok and beyond, but in Thailand to start with. We haven’t considered outside Thailand just yet,” he added.
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