Is Foodpanda Expanding Its Delivery Radius With Higher Delivery Fees?

Food delivery is becoming quite the norm here in Singapore and customers can typically contact the restaurant directly (or via a platform like Oddle) or use one of the major food delivery platforms on the market (e.g. foodpanda and GrabFood). Back in April 2020, GrabFood users started enjoying islandwide delivery which connects more F&B establishments to the people. While this is a great idea as it gives consumers more choice, it does bring about a certain set of challenges that range from cost to planning. Now it seems like foodpanda is also thinking about jumping on this bandwagon (somewhat) as there are indications of a delivery radius expansion.

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Photo Credit: foodpanda

Now I have to say that this is purely based on my own conjecture and if you have been following The Shutterwhale on Instagram, you will realise that I use the foodpanda platform a lot (since the customer service is better and I do find the delivery fees to be more reasonable as well). As mentioned previously, you can easily save quite a bit on foodpanda (especially if you opt for self pick-up to save 15%) but more importantly, I have been able to earn at least 8 miles per dollar on most of my transactions.

While using the app yesterday, I realised that there were more options that were previously unavailable - these restaurants are located further from where I am at and foodpanda was showing the following message: 

Some stores might be temporarily unavailable & back soon. Browse for more!

Photo Credit: foodpanda

Upon closer investigation today, I realised that these stores (still marked as temporarily unavailable) have a slightly-higher delivery fee of SGD 4.49 versus SGD 3.49. While this could be entirely a coincidence, I do think that foodpanda is expanding its delivery radius to offer more choices to the consumer. Now I personally do not think that foodpanda will be rolling out an islandwide delivery option anytime soon (even though they do have 10,000 riders according to a recent article on Straits Times) but I do believe that customers will start seeing more F&B establishments on their location-based app with a higher delivery fee.