Munch:On – Going beyond lunch

Munch:On – Going beyond lunch

Most food delivery platforms witnessed a slowdown in business once lockdown came into effect. Working from home gave people enough time to cook their own meals and with redundancies and salary cuts, a more frugal attitude was embraced. For UAE-based Lunch:On - now rebranded to Munch:On - its main business of delivering lunch to workers in offices came to a standstill. The startup had to counter the crisis with a shift in its model.

We spoke to Mohammad Al Zaben, co-founder and chief executive officer, about how the company is coping with the crisis and its future plans.

How have you pivoted your strategy and operations to cope with the outbreak?

The virus really affected us in a major way. People were working from the office, and we built a business model that catered to them in that physical location. As soon as we started seeing people working from home, that had a huge impact on our business. Overnight we saw our business dropping and over the course of a week we went from over a 100 per cent all-time high to a significant low rate, it was a major hit.

We really needed to improvise. What was good is that we were piloting a dinner