Online food delivery for specific parts of ingredients – Wired PR Lifestyle Story

Since it may take me 2 hours to prepare something other than instant noodles or preserves, I still haven’t reached the level of maturity I’m preparing for every day of the adult week. So for now, the work is only reserved for weekends or especially productive weekdays.

Abdulrahman Ahmed is a student of Software Engineering and can relate to this. Often picking up food to take away, he rarely prepared for himself. But when he did, he saw that the chunks of ingredients sold in regular grocery stores were too large.

“[They don’t have] considering consumers like me, a person who would only cook once or twice in 2 weeks and who would be forced to buy more food than I need, ”Abdulrahman told the Vulcan Post, which often leads to a waste of food after spoiling.

Therefore, individuals were responsible for developing a service where they could buy food in smaller portions, so that they could only buy the ingredients in the exact quantities they needed.

The tipping point was a single banana

Born and raised in the United Arab Emirates, Abdulrahman came to KL to study at the University of Asia Pacific. He lived alone, occasionally craving home meals and wherever he could, he took the food he had brought with him.

“As Somalis, we usually ate chicken or beef biryani with a banana, ”he shared. “So I should always spend too much when I need one when buying a bunch of bananas.”

Overwhelmed, he remembered telling his twin brother, “Why am I forced to buy all these bananas I don’t want when I need one? I wish there was a service that would allow me to buy the exact portion of food I needed. ”

That was the driving force behind Abdulrahman’s launch trip Fractional Market In October 2021, half a banana as its logo.

Buy what you need

The Fractional Market Store page allows customers to purchase food in installments. From there, you can add items to your cart and determine the weight or quantity you want (e.g., 1 part banana or 100 g of milk) from a drop-down menu.

Validating his market, Abdulrahman realized that people mostly wanted to buy fresh vegetables in smaller quantities because they would go bad faster.

On the other hand, the meat could freeze. Thus, with meat and other frozen items less of a priority, Abdulrahman has limited the items offered, but is willing to add more in the future, and will do so as the business grows.

He doesn’t even have an inventory

Although it operates on a small scale, the most economical and efficient way to perform this operation is for each order. That is, when an order arrives, Abdulrahman will go to the nearby grocery store, buy the products, break them up at home, and then deliver them to the consumer.

To maintain his level of food safety, Abdulrahman, who sometimes ropes his brother, wears face masks, gloves and covers his entire hair when working with items.

“Repackaging shouldn’t take more than 1 or 2 minutes because we try to reduce external contact as much as possible,” he added.

Now re-packaged in plastic ziplock bags, Abdulrahman is also exploring greener options as being environmentally conscious and sustainable is one of the company’s core values. It was the whole point of Fractional Market’s presence, hopefully, to reduce food waste.

Taking advantage of pop culture

One thing that I found interesting about the Fractional Market was also the commitment to order a customer’s food and deliver it within an hour, considering the re-shipping required. Although I did not try it myself, Abdulrahman was able to carry out his orders during this period.

This is because most of his current clients are neighbors in his apartment complex.

As a young man, he also had interesting marketing ideas that took advantage of pop culture. 2 weeks after the site was launched, the Squid Game was the talk of the town.

So Abdulrahman and his brother made cards that looked like session ones and left them on the doorstep of the residents.

He printed 100 pieces and spent 2 hours cutting the shape. He then woke up the next day at 4:30 a.m. and spent more than an hour walking around the building, selectively leaving the cards in front of the doors that showed the most shoes.

“For me, that meant getting more potential customers for each card,” Abdulrahman said. And out of the 100 tickets distributed, Fractional Market received about 70 new visits to the site. (Well, thankfully those cards weren’t an entry for Squid Games IRL.)

Although he did not get an explosive result, he reported receiving an average of 1-2 requests per day.

Will this work on a large scale?

In my opinion, Fractional Market and the way it runs right now can work on a smaller scale when there aren’t many customers. If demand goes up, however, there should be a larger team to handle preparation and delivery.

So I had to look at its sustainability plan for its founder Fractional Market.

“It’s a business that would benefit greatly from scale,” he believed. With more users, there will be more data about customer requests, and at the same time, it will be valuable information for the team to manage the inventory that Abdulrahman hopes to expand as well.

“I think this business has a lot of potential and if I’m able to deal with the initial storm, I can manage the growth from there.”

As he says, there is a chance that demand will grow, but it is likely that some processes will need to be automated in the future to meet higher demand.

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Of course, Malaysia has stores that buy food in installments: bulk stores. But from our previous analysis, we found it mostly responds to the rich, which is less affordable for those who need food in parts at a lower cost.

Therefore, Fractional Market addresses a problem in a small and efficient way to help people with fewer privileges who are looking for smaller portions when shopping for food. Groups such as students and individual homes are included.

• You can learn more about Fractional Market here.
• You can read more stories related to zero garbage here.

Notable Image Credit: Abdulrahman Ahmed, Founder of Fractional Market