Abstract
The sudden COVID-19 pandemic had a serious impact on the catering industry, and lockdown policies put a strain on the food supply chain. However, online food delivery (OFD) services have played an important role in the fight against the epidemic in the catering industry. In this chapter, the authors analyzed the development of keywords attributed to supply chains in the academic view by investigating the core selection of Web of Science and China National Knowledge Infrastructure, respectively, and drew keywords cluster graphs of Chinese catering supply chain by using CiteSpace. The contrastive analysis shows that more attention has been turned to supply chain resiliency, efficiency, and visibility in the post-pandemic era. Moreover, this chapter discusses whether and how Chinese OFD platforms contribute to the food supply chain. The results show that these OFD platforms, with domestic policy support, internet technologies, and the ecosystem advantages, have effectively enhanced supply chain resiliency, efficiency, and visibility.
TopIntroduction
The pandemic caused disruptions in our everyday life, especially in the supply chain of the catering industry for daily-essential products (Abhijit et al., 2021), from the perspective of logistics (Abhijit, 2021) and supply network (Maximo et al., 2020), thus drawing wide attention in the public and business perception (Diana, 2021). According to the definition of European and American “Standard Industry Classification”, the catering industry refers to the catering service organizations for the purpose of commercial profit, which mainly provides supply of food to either events or hotels. However, in China, according to the definition of “Notes on The Classification of National Economy Industries”, the catering industry refers to the service activities of on-site cooking and preparation of food in a certain place and selling it to customers for on-site consumption, which is specifically divided into three types, namely mass consumption market, high-grade catering market and atmosphere catering market.
In this chapter, the authors analyze the supply chain of catering industry, mainly focusing on mass consumption market, namely the online food delivery (OFD) industry, which provides food delivery services and related services primarily for household consumption. As shown in Figure 1, monthly sales revenue and growth rate of the catering industry fluctuated a lot in China from August 2019 to August 2021. It can be summarized that since the outbreak, China's catering industry has experienced four stages of development: precipitous decline, sluggish consumption, recovery, and relatively stable period (MeiTuan Research Institute, 2020).
However, it is worth noting that, at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, the revenue of the Chinese catering industry suffered a significant drop from ￥419.43 billion to ￥183.2 billion (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2021), which indicates that the pandemic has hit supply chains hard. Until October 2020, China, as one of the few countries in the world to show early signs of economic recovery (Yue et al., 2021), saw a recovery and positive growth in the catering industry as the epidemic prevention gained momentum, the general situation stabilized and OFD industry continued to penetrate (China Hospitality Association, 2021).
Figure 1. Monthly sales revenue and growth rate of the catering industry in China from August 2019 to August 2021 (in billion yuan)
Food delivery services, attracting many consumers, have gained popularity worldwide. The popularity of Smart phones and mobile payment (Linan, et al., 2019) as well as the rapid development of urbanization (Choi et al., 2021) and service industry has fueled the fast-growing OFD industry. In particular, due to COVID-19 and lockdown policies in many countries, it led to an increase in global amount of OFD orders. As is depicted in Figure 2, the global OFD market increased by 17% in forecasted gross merchandise in 2020, which shows that OFD services have widened their potential clientele and presence in consumption patterns significantly.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Contactless Delivery: “Contactless delivery” was the delivery service model which was first introduced by MeiTuan during the fight against the epidemic. To be specific, placing goods in designated locations reduces the risk of infection by reducing face-to-face contact so as to ensure the safety of consumers and take-out delivery clerks in the delivery link.
Food Delivery APPs (FDAs): Based on the popularity of smart phones, APPs have been developed as an effective platform to connect consumers, catering enterprises and take-out delivery clerks. On the client side, consumers place orders by browsing merchant information. Then, the merchant prepares the products / services according to the order and the take-out delivery clerks deliver them to the consumers. Meanwhile, consumers could see the delivery location and expected arrival time of the riders, and contact the riders in-time through the channel of FDAs.
Take-Out Delivery Clerk: It refers to service personnel engaged in takeaway delivery. Take-out delivery clerks are mainly responsible for receiving orders and picking up goods from corresponding merchants. Finally, the goods will be delivered to consumers within the specified time.
On-Demand Service: It refers to providing timely service to consumers. In the OFD industry, it refers to the delivery of goods or services to users without time or place restrictions.
Online-to-Offline (O2O): O2O refers to the combination of offline business with the Internet. In the OFD industry, major take-out catering enterprises adopt O2O mode, which integrates online services with offline ones, including sales, marketing, and delivery. For consumers, it means placing orders online and receiving products / services offline.
Intelligent Dispatch: Taking advantage of information technology, “Intelligent Dispatch” delivery system provides an efficient order distribution scheme and optimal route planning, combining with order information, delivery personnel capacity information, traffic and weather conditions, to achieve the best match of consumers and take-out delivery clerks.
Online Food Delivery (OFD): It refers to the point-to-point logistics services for take-out within the city, mainly including order receiving, delivery, distribution, delivery and other links.
Take-Out: To provide users with a variety of goods and off-site purchase services, it connects consumers with catering and retail enterprises through the Internet or telephone. In a narrow sense, take-out refers to the delivery service of fast food. Broadly speaking, take-out refers to all products and services. Consumers could order food products or services online without leaving home.