What is Honestbee? Honestbee Review

Honestbee is an online grocery delivery service company founded in December 2014 and officially started operations in Singapore in July 2015. Users select online products from their favorite stores and place orders. Then Honestbee uses trained shoppers to pick up the items for users from the stores specified by the users, and then hand these goods over to Honestbee's professional logistics team, which guarantees door-to-door delivery within one hour.

Operational Model

Housewives, people who need to take care of sick people at home, and college students on the platform are part-time workers who cannot work full-time. They go to local grocery stores and supermarkets to complete their purchases according to the user's shopping list, and then hand over the goods to Honestbee's professional logistics team, which guarantees delivery within one hour.

Positioning development

1. Honestbee's initial positioning was "online grocery delivery service provider": users select products and place orders in online stores, and then Honestbee's shoppers help customers purchase from the user's designated store, and then hand it over to Honestbee's logistics team to ensure that it is delivered to the door within an hour. It can be seen that in the early days, Honestbee was actually a fresh food e-commerce delivery service provider. Although Honestbee's early model was very light (it did not manage the supply chain itself), it involved the management of shoppers and delivery staff and cooperation with supermarkets, which was not easy to do. Moreover, Honestbee started to explore markets outside of Singapore, including Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and was wealthy enough to poach many operations and data management personnel from Rocket Internet's subsidiaries.

2. Later, Honestbee continued to make new attempts and launched services such as food delivery and laundry. Honestbee also contacted e-commerce platforms and sellers in markets such as the Philippines to promote their delivery services.

3. Honestbee is now also taking the physical route. On October 18, 2018, Honestbee's physical store "Habitat" opened in Singapore, causing quite a stir in the media and venture capital circles in Singapore. This physical store covers an area of ​​60,000 square feet (about 5,000 square meters), integrating supermarkets, fresh grocery stores, online order processing centers, and experiential dining. Habitat has two innovations: cashless checkout experience (AutoCheckout) and robot collection system (RoboCollect). Customers can use the Honestbee app to scan and pay, and items of 10 or less can be purchased immediately. For more than 10 items, the robot and conveyor belt system handles sorting and packaging. After placing an order, just wait at the pickup point, and the robot and conveyor belt will deliver the packaged goods.

Founder Joel Sng said early on that he wanted to be "Asia's largest online grocery store." In terms of regions, Honestbee is still working in two directions at the same time: one is developed economies, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan; the other is middle-income economies, including Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Founder

Honestbee's founder is Joel Sng, who also has another name, Zhiwei Sng. In addition to Joel, there are two other co-founders, Jonathan Low and Issac Tay. However, it is understood that everyone inside Honestbee knows that Joel is the absolute boss, and the other two generally keep quiet in team meetings.

Development History

-In December 2014, Honestbee was founded.

-In January 2015, it received seed round financing from Raven Ventures Australia.

-In July 2015, Honestbee officially started operations in Singapore.

-In October 2015, Honestbee announced the completion of a US$15 million Series A financing round, led by the well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm FoRMAtion 8, and followed by investors Gideon Yu, Owen Van Natta, Steve Chen and investment company Prejman Mar Ventures.

-In November 2015, a pop-up store in Niseko was launched.

-In January 2016, Honestbee was launched in Taiwan.

-In September 2018, Honestbee raised about $46 million, and its largest backer was one of the Korean chaebols.

-On October 18, 2018, Honestbee’s physical store “Habitat” opened in Singapore, causing quite a stir in Singapore’s media and venture capital circles.

-In April 2019, TechCrunch reported that Honestbee was short of funds and might plan to sell its business. This was mainly due to the high costs incurred by the company's use of discounts to attract new users and online marketing expenses. The company has had early conversations with companies including Grab and Go-Jek to discuss acquiring part or all of their businesses.