A chef serves Peking duck to customers in a Beijing restaurant. (Photo : www.theepochtimes.com)
Woyoufan, an online platform that serves home-cooked meals established early this year, is becoming popular that a rising number of hosts have become interested to use the platform, the Want China Times reported.
The report said that Woyoufan has assisted hosts in serving 1,000 dinners for more than 8,000 customers, with a repurchase rate as high as 40 percent.
"When people sit down to share gourmet food, there are no strangers," Feng Zheng, the platform's founder, said.
According to the report, the hosts cook for diners who have already paid for the food but are complete strangers to each other. As the diners arrive at the host's venue, each diner makes a brief self-introduction before the meal is served and the party starts.
The report said that the idea for the platform was inspired by Feng's experience living abroad. A Yale University graduate, Feng returned to China in 2014 where he took note of the emerging "sharing economy" adopted by online companies such as Airbnb and Uber.
Feng told Century Business Herald that he had difficulty finding both hosts and diners when the platform was set up.
"The first batch of private cooks was sought out by our staff in Beijing. They themselves already ran such dinner-sharing businesses and we simply got them on board and changed the model from word-of-mouth promotion or phone pre-ordering to online orders," Feng was quoted as saying.
Feng said that he has a screening team that visits the host's venues to inspect the environment including the cooking process and the personality of the hosts. If the environment or the host's personal qualities do not meet the website's standards, they decline to add the host to the platform. According to Feng, up to 70 percent of prospective hosts fail in this level.
Feng added that their threshold in establishing the platform is not too high, and they are after handling the details and formulating the rules.
"We have photographers to film the host preparing the dishes. We have an editorial team, personnel that set the routes and take on-site records, as well as others to arrange for follow-up communication work," he said.
The platform has limited each meal to between four and eight diners to ensure smooth dining and to allow diners to chat among themselves.
Feng added that the platform only offers reference prices and does not interfere with the prices charged by the hosts, nor does it take any commission from them.
Feng hopes to monetize the service by working with enterprises or value-added services after getting a certain number of users.
