Online Food Delivery Services During COVID-19: A Case Study in Brunei Darussalam

Introduction

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic reached Brunei, an upward trend has been observed in the usage of delivery services. The alarming surge in cases has caused the government to impose strict social distancing measures as a nationwide restriction to manage the spread of the virus in the community. Due to this, food establishments such as restaurants, cafes, food courts, and others are not allowed to provide dine-in service, resulting in takeout and food delivery becoming the new normal. According to the Global Digital Insights by DataReportal (2021), 99% of the total population in Brunei are active social media users, which is an increase of 7.3% from January 2020 to January 2021. This could be due to the massive encouragement of technology ever since the pandemic, with rapid growth in online shopping through social media and the maximization of e-business, including online food delivery services.

There are several online food delivery services, including deliveries from food delivery companies, personal runners, and in-house delivery services provided by restaurants. Food delivery companies such as GoMamam, Ta-pow!, and Heydomo provide delivery through orders from their mobile applications or websites. On the other hand, personal runners are delivery service providers whom customers pay to collect and deliver food from restaurants to their homes, who primarily market and publicize their services on social media platforms such as Instagram. Several restaurants in Brunei, such as Pizza Hut, also provide their delivery service through their order websites or hotline call. These are the main types of online food delivery services that can be seen currently growing in Brunei today.

In the pre-COVID-19 season, the usage of food delivery was scarce and often used for different reasons. When the pandemic hit, the online food delivery service experienced high demand in Brunei. The unexpected increase in users and orders during the first wave of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic has created challenges for online delivery platforms in Brunei. This is due to high platform and application traffic and dispatchers not being available. With an average of over 100 deliveries per day, the usage of GoMamam and HeyDomo, the two dominant online delivery platforms in Brunei is exploding. GoMamam and HeyDomo were founded in June 2019 and February 2020 respectively. At the time of its debut, both had less than 10 vendors included in the application. During the second wave of the pandemic in Brunei in 2021, customers now have access to over 200 suppliers and sellers on their respective apps (Almunawar, 2022).

Some suggested that the restriction due to the COVID-19 pandemic has caused the exponential Growth of online food delivery services usage. Research has been done elsewhere on online food delivery growth factors, but little work has been done in Brunei to explore this problem.

This research aims to identify the key factors that lead to the rise of demand for online food delivery services during the COVID-19 pandemic. The objectives of the research are:

• 1)

  to assess the current trend in using online food delivery services in Brunei;

• 2)

  to understand the factors of customer behavior, convenience, trust, and customer satisfaction with the rise of usage of online food delivery services;

• 3)

  to assess individuals' opinions and experiences on online food delivery service usage during the pandemic.