This Shanghai start-up delivers cook-at-home meals to expats

Saucepan is still in its early days and is eyeing a $1.26 million funding target, reports Tech in Asia

Not long after arriving in Shanghai, Simon Vogel realised that his goal of opening a restaurant wasn’t going to happen as planned.
 

“It’s much more difficult to open a restaurant in Shanghai now than it was five years ago,” he tells Tech in Asia. “The more we looked into the restaurant market we realised that, with rents what they are now, it’s not a safe investment.”
 

It wasn’t an issue of skill – with years of experience in the hospitality industry, a co-founder with the same, and an experienced chef already on board, Simon and his team were ready to start a food and beverage business in Shanghai. They just needed to decide what kind.
 

 

“Initially, we were not looking at a tech-based solution,” he says. “On the other hand, there was this boom of tech companies in the US like Blue Apron and Plated.”
 

And so, in fall of 2014, Simon and his co-founders scrapped the restaurant idea for good – and launched Saucepan, one of Shanghai’s first cook-at-home meal delivery services.
 

A user’s first interaction with Saucepan comes from the company’s website. For now, Saucepan only delivers within a fairly small region of Shanghai, albeit the one where many of the city’s foreigners live or work.
 

The company is still in its early days and currently ships an average of 15 dishes per day – not a huge number, but about twice what the company was moving in August. The market is almost exclusively expats (about 90%), and they are geographically limited to the area surrounding Saucepan’s kitchen and office.
 

Simon and his co-founder are planning to expand to other neighbourhoods within Shanghai by the end of the year, and are targeting a figure of 200 dishes served per day by the one-year anniversary of their product launch next June.

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This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.