Gesoo is a Chinese instant delivery platform in North America, providing users with takeout, supermarket, fresh food and intra-city parcel delivery. It was founded in Los Angeles in early 2014. The founding team found that because the United States is vast and sparsely populated, and Chinese food businesses are concentrated in cities, it is not easy for Chinese students who generally live in the suburbs to eat delicious Chinese food. This gave the team the idea of ??creating a Chinese food delivery platform targeting Chinese.

According to data provided by Gesoo, the U.S. catering industry has a market size of 800 billion, but the takeout business only accounts for 5% of it, but the demand for takeout is huge. The local Chinese community in the United States is huge, and there are about 14,000 Chinese restaurants. However, faced with cultural differences and language barriers on the local takeout platform, as well as the huge difference in category from American restaurants, it is difficult for Chinese restaurants to access the takeout business. On the other hand, logistics in the United States is mainly aimed at long-term business, and intra-city express delivery is rare. These have brought possibilities to the development of Gesoo.

Gesoo’s business is divided into two parts: instant delivery and intra-city freight. It is currently mainly carried out in the Los Angeles urban agglomeration. The instant delivery business covers restaurants, fresh food and supermarkets, and intra-city freight is mainly for small packages that can be delivered on the same day. After the user places an order on the platform, the system automatically assigns a driver to pick up the meal. Currently, according to data provided by Sun Linjia to Yiou Catering, there are more than 1,000 registered restaurants on the Gesoo platform, more than 200 active restaurants, and about 30,000 monthly active users.

Unlike Chinese takeaway guys who each have an electric car, American takeaway guys mainly use cars as delivery vehicles. Gesoo mainly uses idle transportation capacity in society, and the platform adopts an Uber-like cooperation with drivers. In this way, the driver will be paid a proportional delivery fee. Due to local traffic congestion and scattered transportation capacity, the delivery time of takeout in the United States is relatively long, and the requirements for delivery time of American cold dishes are not high, so Americans have a higher tolerance for delivery time. However, most Chinese takeaways are hot food, which greatly increases the delivery time requirements.

For any food delivery platform, delivery time is one of the most important issues. In 2015, Gesoo tried to expand its business to New York and San Francisco, but at that time the IT system was not developed enough, the business model was not mature enough, and takeout took a long time (about 2.5 hours per order), so the plan failed. After 2017, in response to operational difficulties, Gesoo upgraded the system and conducted distance analysis to improve the accuracy and efficiency of allocating drivers, ensuring delivery within 1 hour within 8 kilometers and 1.5 hours within 16 kilometers. It also upgraded the client, driver side to shorten the information chain.

In addition, Gesoo has improved its management model for merchants, allowing merchants to prioritize meals for platform users to improve timeliness, and attaches great importance to handling customer complaints, charging users only a US$1 service fee. On the driver side, Gesoo has improved drivers’ income and work standards, and established a strict reward and penalty system. This series of measures has greatly improved the user experience of the platform. Starting in the second half of 2018, Gesoo restarted its expansion plan, planning to expand its business to Phoenix in April 2019, and then to Houston and Seattle.

In addition to technical and management issues, local demands and policies in the United States are also a major obstacle for Gesoo. First of all, the situation in various regions of the United States is quite different. For example, the public transportation in Los Angeles is very underdeveloped, and private car traffic jams are serious; while the public transportation in New York is good, which is more conducive to the development of takeout delivery. Different urban development situations also bring about different user needs, which requires food delivery platforms to have an in-depth understanding and take countermeasures during the expansion process. In addition, the United States has strict policies and controls on the catering industry. It does not allow takeout delivery of raw meat from hot pot restaurants. It only allowed the delivery of private dishes in January this year. However, it currently does not allow third-party platform access and can only be delivered by merchants.

In response to this problem, the Gesoo team is composed of Chinese with a background of studying in the United States in order to better understand the local situation. Gesoo's Chinese and English platform and its two-way understanding of Chinese catering culture and U.S. laws and policies have simplified the process of connecting Chinese restaurants to the takeout business. However, whether it can flexibly respond to different situations in different regions of the United States will still be a major test for Gesoo's future development.

According to market analysis company Statista, the size of the food delivery market in North America will reach US$21.5 billion in 2019. In the North American market, Chinese takeout platforms have gradually emerged in recent years. In addition to Gesoo in the United States, there are also Tutti and Rice Balls in Canada. They are all entrepreneurial achievements of local international students, and they are increasingly influential in the Chinese community. However, compared with large food delivery companies such as GrabHub, UberEats, DoorDash, PostMates, etc., the user groups of Chinese food delivery platforms are basically limited to Chinese, and the number of restaurants connected is also very limited. Especially food delivery platforms like UberEats, relying on Uber's huge driver group and existing user group, have natural advantages in size.

The advantage of the Chinese takeout platform is that it is highly targeted and emphasizes service quality and user experience.

For example, Tutti provides restaurants with real-time delivery services of fresh food, wine, etc., and also provides smart restaurant systems to help traditional restaurants connect to online platforms and improve the restaurant's meal delivery efficiency. The Fantuan App learned from domestic takeout platforms, simplified the process of ordering food for users, and built a customer service system and review system that foreign apps do not have. This is also reflected in Gesoo, which is extending its review business and improving restaurant services to enhance user experience.

Compared with the domestic takeout market, most restaurants in North America use telephone takeout services. Online takeout accounts for less than 10% of the overall takeout market, and the main payment method is credit card. However, Chinese people are more receptive to mobile phone ordering and payment methods, which provides soil for the development of Chinese takeout platforms, but it will inevitably become a bottleneck for its development. Fortunately, according to data from the catering website Eater, among the most popular takeout categories among North American users, Chinese food occupies the top spot, which means that Chinese takeout platforms are likely to gain widespread favor among locals. In addition, there is no "subsidy war" among North American food delivery platforms. Users take it for granted that they pay delivery fees and will tip the delivery staff a certain amount, which greatly reduces the burden on the food delivery platform. Gesoo has achieved breakeven. Gesoo has previously received seed round financing and will launch a new round of financing in the first quarter of this year.

In 2019, Gesoo will increase cooperation with restaurants, expand restaurant supply chain business, and distribute ingredients to Chinese restaurants through cooperation with food companies, farms, and supermarkets. Gesoo will also expand its review business to improve restaurant service levels and user experience. The scale of instant delivery is Gesoo's development goal in 2019. In addition to entering more cities, Gesoo will also expand its delivery team and use its logistics and delivery capabilities to feed back its front-end business lines.