Foodpanda integrates restaurant reviews from OpenRice to online food ordering platform

Foodpanda, a Rocket Internet-backed global, multi-location online food ordering platform with operations in India, has announced a partnership with Southeast Asian restaurant review portal OpenRice. With this partnership, Foodpanda users will be able to check out food reviews for each listed restaurant they wish to order from, while OpenRice customers will be able to order food directly from local restaurants by accessing the Foodpanda delivery widget on each restaurant profile's overview tab.

OpenRice is an online platform for restaurant details and user-generated reviews, which has a huge customer base across Southeast Asia. The firm is present in India and has partnered with a number of restaurants in 13 cities across the country.

It directly competes with global online restaurant reviews site Zomato. Zomato is already present in 40 cities across 11 countries, including India, the UK, the UAE, South Africa, New Zealand, the Philippines, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Qatar.

"This partnership between Foodpanda and OpenRice will enable our customers to make a more informed choice, thus making the process more transparent, convenient and customer friendly," said Rohit Chadda, MD and founder, Foodpanda.in.

Besides India, this partnership will also be extended to Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia in the near future, Foodpanda said in a press release.

Founded in April 2012, Foodpanda (Hellofood in some markets) features location-specific listing of restaurants on its site. Users can check out menus, along with special offers, post which they can order and get it delivered to their homes. One can also search for restaurants according to cuisine, and/or by other parameters such as vegetarian/non-veg, healthy food, etc. The company helps restaurants increase sales through online and mobile platforms and also provides them with technology and analytics. Early this month, the firm raised $20 million in funding from Phenomen Ventures, a Russia-based venture capital firm and a group of unnamed investors.

In India, it has a coverage of 3,000 restaurants across 14 cities, including Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Bangalore, Kolkata, Ahmedabad and Chandigarh.

"The fact that we can now integrate our individual expertise and extend our services through each other's online presence means that we are looking at offering an online food and restaurant experience in a more credible manner. Foodpanda's growth across Asia has been commendable so far and bringing our services to India through this partnership is an exciting development for us," OpenRice MD Jan Wong said.

OpenRice has expanded to nine markets—Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, India and the Philippines—with over 1 million restaurant listings, 900,000 registered members, 1.6 million restaurant reviews, 8 million monthly unique visitors and 130 million monthly page views.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)