Best Food Delivery Concierge: UI, UX, Overall Value (Q1 2019)

From the archive. Originally published on migmol.com on 2019-04-07, recovered and republished here in 2026 at its original address. Unedited except for formatting.

Metro Manila: Let’s face it, sometimes you don’t want to cook or have no one to cook for you and just want food at home. Thankfully, there has been a rise in food delivery concierge services in the past few years.

Foodpanda was the first in the market, coming in as early as 2014. And of course, Honestbee and Grab Food have come up in the last few years.

Let’s compare the three top services.

HONESTBEE: Easily the best; terrible at customer service

Honestbee’s user interface is the cleanest and easiest to read and navigate. Despite the brand having yellow as their main color, it wasn’t as distracting as FoodPanda pink.

The group order feature is a nice touch and shows that they’re thinking about how people use their app. They’re the only app of the three that has this feature.

Perhaps the only negative aspect of Honestbee is their terrible customer service. I don’t have enough data to conclude if they have more food cancellations than the other services, but when there are issues, they basically have no customer service.

You have easy access to a chat button, but every single time you use it, you are put in a queue and no one will reply to you until the next day. There was a time when I had to look up the contact number of the partner restaurant just to resolve my issue.

FOODPANDA: Most improved but with limited selection; often late

Foodpanda currently has the lowest delivery fee, so if a restaurant is available in multiple apps, you can save a few bucks using Foodpanda. They do have the fewest restaurant partners, considering that they have corporate partners that are only available through them (i.e. Chowking, Jollibee).

Foodpanda has been around for quite a while now and they definitely have come a long way from their dismal beginnings. They may have the best restaurant menu navigation, giving the ability to move both vertically (individual items) or horizontally (menu sections).

Foodpanda also only doesn’t have a 2-point security check for credit cards. That can be a good thing or bad thing (security), but from a user point of view, if I’m having the food delivered to the same address and am not ordering a significantly huge amount, it’s probably a legit transaction. For both Foodpanda and Honestbee though fingerprint verification would save users a lot of time.

Speaking of repeat orders, Foodpanda also conveniently shows the most recent food orders you’ve made with each restaurant which you can reorder in one click. Currently, they’re the only app that has this feature.

One thing bad about Foodpanda though is that they are consistently late. If the delivery team is from Foodpanda (they don’t use their partner restaurant’s fleet) there is a high chance your delivery will arrive later than the initial estimated time.

I’ve been a consistent Honestbee user for the last few years, but have been finding that I’m using Foodpanda more & more.

GRAB FOOD: the Grab of food delivery

Grab Food has so much potential. They have a competitive list of partners and currently have the most promos.

Obviously, the app is part of the Grab ecosystem of services which gives them a unique advantage in using Grab points. Outside of that, having one app do everything is causing a lot of problems for the Grab Food user experience.

The first thing you’ll notice is the long load time. You have to open the app, then click on ‘food’, which then takes more time to find your location before you reach the list of restaurants. From clicking on the app until being able to browse restaurants, Grab Food takes 10 seconds, which for anyone familiar with UX is an eternity. It might not cause users to drop off, but it will annoy them enough that they’ll complain about it.

When you’re finally using the app, you might find that they seem to have force-fit the food delivery service within the existing app. Perhaps it’s having the size of the images and fonts too small, but viewing the long list of restaurants doesn’t feel natural.

When you pick a restaurant and go to the menu, it combines the worst parts of the full vertical scroll (Honestbee) and horizontal category scroll (Foodpanda). Then when you’re selecting food items, there is no way to pick/customize for a variant (e.g. pick between Coke vs Sprite or pick a flavor). Instead, it just lists all the possible combinations which add to the bulky menu.

Unlike the two other apps, when you’re in checkout and want to remove an item, you can’t just cancel it from the checkout view. You have to go back to the cumbersome food menu, find the item you want to cancel, and then set the quantity to zero.

Also frustrating, especially if you’re browsing between the three apps, is that if you have items in checkout and you close the app, it forgets the items. So if you change your mind and decide to order through Grab, you have to repeat the process and select all the items you want to order. Honestbee & Foodpanda remember what’s in your basket, even if you close the app or even switch between mobile and desktop.

And last Grab Food inherits all the wrong things about Grab. You can’t always use the service because there may be no riders in the area. Sometimes you get a rider, they decide they don’t want to serve you, and they force you to be the one to cancel on the app. Strangely, you can’t use your credit card, even if this is a clear advantage of using the same app that already has your credit card details.

Consolidating Grab Rewards is a promising feature as it’s basically a cash back, but that is the only redeeming factor of Grab Food. I want to be excited for it, but they are exactly where Foodpanda was 5 years ago.

The best as of Q1 2019

Clearly, Honestbee is still the best. Foodpanda follows close behind. And Grab Food has so much potential but is, for now, a very far third. Not included in this review are the smaller services like Delivery Guy or Zomato because they are at their infancy stage.

Which of the three apps do you use the most? What would make you use them more? What do you want them to improve about their service? Let me know and I’ll include it in a follow-up article.

Watch this space

Food delivery concierge services are part of the ecommerce landscape and are interesting because they have a sizable amount of daily users, sometimes from multiple services. An already engaged buyer is more likely to purchase again.

While already shaking up the consumption landscape, new routes-to-market are still also emerging. A concept called ‘ghost kitchens’ is rising in cities like New York or Chicago, where an app like Uber Eats shows 5 different restaurants with completely different menus, but all items are made from the same concessionaire. The ‘ghost kitchen’ doesn’t serve any dine-in or take out customers and only exists ‘virtually’ through food delivery apps.

Perhaps the biggest lesson here is an essential component of ecommerce that few companies capitalize on: user experience (UX) is critical; operations is essential. Without a strong customer-centric operational backbone, businesses can fail. But still, we have so many entrepreneurs or business owners who focus on the technical, digital, or branding side without giving much thought to user experience. You have companies that are focused on growth or user acquisition without considering customer service or continuous improvement. UI (user interface) can be fixed on desktops and correlated with data, but if you don’t go to where the user is, you’re not really working on UX.

Ecommerce in the Philippines is still at the infancy stage. We need strong second & third challengers in so many fields. Current industry dominance is only temporary; the ‘giants’ can still be toppled. Just because you are disrupting the industry now doesn’t mean you aren’t going to be disrupted yourself. Sometimes, being a first-mover can even be a disadvantage.

Whatever happens, this will continue to be an exciting landscape so watch this space!