Johan Antlov (dailysocial.id)

In big cities, grocery shopping has somehow become a far more complex activity, especially for those who have tight work schedules and have to deal with daily traffic congestion. Then comes HappyFresh, an online grocery shopping service that aims to provide solutions to this problem. The Jakarta Post’s Dylan Amirio recently spoke with HappyFresh Indonesia managing director Johan Antlov to get an idea about how customer habits in Indonesia and neighboring countries have opened up huge opportunities for the company.

Question: How did you come up with the idea of HappyFresh?

Answer: The idea was to give people back their time because of their busy schedule. So we thought maybe we could do something within the grocery space. Online grocery shopping services are big in other parts of the world but interestingly non-existent in Southeast Asia.

So the concept of HappyFresh was founded [in 2014]. At the time we had the e-commerce expertise but we didn’t have an understanding of retail. That’s why we started talking to retailers about the idea of going online and they were interested because other industries such as fashion and household items have moved into that position while the grocery industry remains virtually untouched. Retailers wanted to do it, but didn’t know how.

We initially launched our first partnership in Indonesia with Ranch Market and Farmer’s Market and then sometime later we launched in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We didn’t have to have a warehouse or a merchandizing team as we work mainly in partnerships. We have also launched our services in Thailand as well.

Do you plan to expand anywhere else?

As of now, 99 percent of grocery shoppers in Indonesia are still shopping offline, so we aim to just penetrate deeper into this market for now. Right now we have operations in Jakarta, Bandung [West Java] and Surabaya [East Java] and we will stick to these markets for the next six months.

In Jakarta, our radius is limited to our partner stores because of the emphasis and importance of delivering fresh meat, produce and frozen goods in their prime state to the customer. We have covered most of the Greater Jakarta area, except for Bogor, and we saw that most of our activity comes from South Jakarta, however we are seeing good growth in Bekasi as well.

How is HappyFresh competing in Indonesia’s highly competitive startup industry?

The key is understanding the habits and the needs of the customers. Our segment is about weekly shopping, not about particularly delivering one item to them. That’s why to do that, we train our HappyFresh workers as personal “shoppers” stationed at all of our partner stores to help pick the best produce and meat for the customer. With that, it involves a lot of trust between us and the customer.

Quality is the most important part of grocery shopping and that is what we want to maintain. There is always a need for competition like this but it’s really understanding how to convert others into understanding the online benefits of this service.

Our delivery service is equipped to ensure the retention of quality. We do ours in-house and unlike other e-commerce delivery services, we have other intricate issues to consider such as preserving produce freshness, separating halal meat or keeping frozen goods that way as they make their journey to the customer. We had to really focus on building our operations to accommodate that.

If you think about it, grocery shopping is very complicated.

Then, how do you plan to convert minds?

For us, the standard e-commerce marketing strategy doesn’t work. We have to build absolute trust. That’s why we combine online and offline strategies and partner also with stores. We talk also with communities and arisan [social gatherings popular with Indonesian housewives] groups about our idea and after talking, any skepticism one may have about this idea becomes alleviated. Directly interacting with the customers helps us to understand their needs and habits better. That’s compared with just seeing HappyFresh in an online ad, where they can’t see the true value of it.

Do you have any specific targets you want to achieve as HappyFresh grows in the future?

Well we share our targets with our partners, and it’s working for them. So far we usually contribute 5 percent to our partner stores’ indoor sales. Groceries are still our main segment because the frequency is always there. We want to expand into more specialty stores as well because when it comes to on-demand local delivery, the grocery segment makes the most sense.

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