The Buzz on Honestbee's Closure in the Philippines

From the archive. Originally published on migmol.com on 2019-04-22, recovered and republished here in 2026 at its original address. Unedited except for formatting.

MANILA. Before the Easter break, Honestbee had announced to its users that they would not have the service running from Holy Thursday to Black Saturday. The other food delivery services continued to function as usual, with Grab Food raising delivery fees and Foodpanda just operating as is. Easter Sunday comes and Honestbee is still down.

It’s the Monday after and Honestbee still has no service. The app just says that they’ll be back, but industry insiders have been confirming that Honestbee is, at least for now, stopping operations in the Philippines.

I recently wrote about how Honestbee is the best concierge service and true to the volatility of the industry, they have now ceased to function. This is Uber all over again; we don’t deserve nice things! But unlike Uber, which has cashed in on their exit in SEA, word is that Honestbee is ‘on pause’ because of cashflow issues. Some insiders report that they are actively seeking a fresh flow of investments, but even if they do succeed, that will take some time to execute.

Were there signs of this happening?

Tech In Asia reports that there have been various retrenchments in the company across the region. In the past few months though, several senior leaders also resigned from the company, including co-founder Isaac Tay and the country managers of Singapore and Malaysia. Local representatives have said that there have been no layoffs in the Philippines as of today.

The Philippines is reportedly Honestbee’s best performing market.

As the public has limited visibility on a company’s finances, sudden closures do happen, especially among startups. In terms of a precedent though, something like this already happened in 2016.

HappyFresh, with roots in Indonesia, was the first regional grocery-delivery service in the Philippines. They started in Q2 of 2016, but by Q3 industry insiders were already wary of their longevity. HappyFresh was reportedly shopping around for more investment money and partners hesitated to invest with them as this news broke out. True enough, HappyFresh didn’t even survive a year and they suddenly closed shop in November 2016.

How is Metromart still alive?

A predecessor to Honestbee in the Philippines, Metromart has been around since the days of HappyFresh. But unlike HappyFresh and Honestbee, Metromart was founded in the Philippines. I’m really happy to see that they’ve survived through two of their regional partners closing down. Do check them out!

Who’s going to replace them?

Foodpanda and Grab Food are still the top players in food delivery. It would be interesting to see what Zomato’s next step is after they’ve amassed such a huge subscriber base from Zomato Gold. They already have a food delivery option on their app. Their track record so far shows that they excel in pivots. LalaFood also launched earlier this year.

The aforementioned Metromart is still active. You can give them a try if you’re looking for a supermarket delivery service. They have fewer partner stores than Honestbee, but I’m sure they’ll be able to benefit from the Honestbee exit and snatch up more partners.

Something worth looking out for is the eventual entry of Gojek to the Philippines. Gojek is the biggest competitor to Grab in the region and is backed by the likes of Google & Tencent. Unfortunately, their attempted entry to the Philippines was blocked by Philippine regulators earlier this year because of foreign-ownership issues. That application was for their ride-hailing service though and not for their other services.

Grab actually partnered with HappyFresh in mid-2018 to launch GrabFresh, but it’s only available in Indonesia.

What does this mean for the industry?

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the reality that there are fewer unicorns from the Philippines than Singapore or Indonesia, but that’s a topic for another day. Metromart seems to be surviving so far, but I really want to see Philippine startups move up to the regional level.

For users and business partners, there are still very good alternatives to Honestbee, so it shouldn’t hurt that much.

As I mentioned in my previous article, the startup space is as volatile as they come, and although in the short-term these sudden closures of crowd-favorites hurt us as consumers, it also proves that the playing field is certainly very open to challengers and new ventures.