On-demand at-home food prep gets cooking

Are you tired of spending your weekends running errands and frittering away your precious time on tedious tasks in the kitchen? Do you wish you could just sit back and relax while someone else takes care of everything for you?

Well, you're in luck, because the rise of on-demand home-cooking services has made it easier than ever to outsource even the most mundane tasks. Priced from hundreds to thousands of yuan, there are countless services available to help you enjoy freshly prepared meals in the comfort of your own homes, without the hassle of cooking and cleaning up.

According to a report by iiMedia Research, on-demand home-cooking services in China have reached a billion-dollar market size. This growth is largely driven by the changing lifestyles of Chinese consumers, who are becoming increasingly health-conscious and time-strapped.

The trend was recently highlighted during a round of heated online discussions. From September 2022 to February 2023, there were over 37,000 pieces of online information related to "home-cooking services", representing an increase of 1,043 percent from the previous cycle, according to People Data, a data analysis platform operated under news website people.cn. It said the earliest related topics were posted on Weibo, and soon went viral across platforms such as life-sharing platform Xiaohongshu and video-sharing platform Bilibili.

As of Feb 12, there were over 220 million views for posts with the hashtag #woman's on-demand home cooking, charging 66 yuan for four dishes and a soup on Weibo. On Xiaohongshu, there were more than 34,000 posts with the hashtag#door-to-door cooking. On Bilibili, the most clicked video related to on-demand home cooking had been played 1.396 million times.

According to Meituan, an on-demand service platform, from October to December, the search volume for home-cooking services increased by 533 percent compared with the previous three-month cycle. It said the private chefs who provided home-cooking services were mostly part-time, and are mainly middle-aged and younger people.

"The aromas, sizzling sounds and tantalizing flavors of the food being prepared before your eyes create a truly immersive experience. The service not only frees me from cooking, but also offers good chances to try new dishes without going out," said Beijing resident Gu Ming in her review of a recent on-demand home-cooking order placed on Xiaohongshu.

Gu spent around 3,000 yuan to order an at-home Chinese New Year's Eve dinner from a chef-on-demand platform. She ordered a one-stop service that included ingredient buying and dishwashing.

"The main reason for me to make the order is to save some time to spend with my family. I haven't met my siblings and their families for several years," she said.

There are many job seekers who are capitalizing on this trend, and Zhou Huan, a Beijing-based former financial analyst, was one of them.

"I started offering personalized home-cooking services in 2021, after realizing that many friends were struggling to eat healthy, home-cooked meals while juggling busy work schedules. I started posting nice pictures of the dishes I cooked on Xiaohongshu, and writing descriptions of different types of services. To my surprise, a lot of people came to my homepage and asked for the service," she said.

To begin with, Zhou charged 88 yuan for four dishes and did all the work herself. "First, I asked the customer's preferences, then customized recipes for the customer to choose from. Customers can either prepare the ingredients themselves or ask me to help with grocery shopping for an extra charge."

Zhou said that at that time, she had just quit her previous job and was going through a gap year. "I had plenty of spare time per day, but still found it hard to handle all of the orders."

She later recruited a team of chefs who specialized in different types of cuisine, and began offering customized meal plans that cater to each customer's dietary needs and preferences.

Since then, Zhou's business has grown rapidly. Her team now has more than 20 chefs and saw a roughly 150 percent yearly growth of revenue last year.

While some people communicate through social media platforms to make appointments for on-demand home cooking, many others — mainly professional chefs seeking part-time jobs — rely more on home service platforms and offer standardized packages for on-site cooking services.

Home service platforms such as Swan Daojia and Home King have all launched on-site cooking services using standardized packages.

In fact, on-demand home-cooking services are not a new concept. As early as 2014, there were apps on the market that focused on such services. Apps such as Idachu ("love chefs"), Good Chef, and Go Home to Eat quickly gained favor with investors.

However, such services soon lost development momentum as the food delivery industry grew, while safety has been a lingering concern for both chefs and customers. The Go Home to Eat app, valued at 2 billion yuan after five rounds of financing in two years, had to suspend operations in 2020.

Zhu Danpeng, a food and beverage analyst and deputy head of the Guangdong Provincial Food Safety Promotion Alliance, said the boom in on-demand home cooking represents an upgrade in consumption and a change in consumer behavior.

Zhu said that with faster-paced lifestyles, an increasing number of people are not willing to cook due to a lack of time and tedious ingredient preparation. However, dining out or ordering takeaway may not meet the demand for healthy eating due to hygiene and food safety concerns. At this point, on-demand home-cooking services can satisfy both "not wanting to cook" and "having a good meal" needs with its high cost-effectiveness, which is gradually gaining acceptance among consumers.

"Going forward, with increasing demand for customized services and higher requirements for food safety and quality, the market will undergo further changes and will have broad prospects," he said.

Zhu added that the rise of on-demand home cooking also represents a new trend of flexible employment. Young people who like cooking can combine their hobbies with making money, use social media for promotion and bring fresh blood to the catering industry. For professional chefs, the choice to be a home cook helps offset the pressures of unemployment, allowing them to leverage their strengths while enjoying more flexibility and freedom.

According to a recent report by People Data, the flexible employment market in China continues to expand, with a growing variety of flexible work arrangements. In 2022, the scale of China's flexible employment market exceeded 1 trillion yuan, representing a yearly growth of 34.9 percent.

The report said in recent years, as digitalization drives traditional industries' transformation and upgrading, a new generation of emerging occupations, such as at-home chefs, at-home beauticians and milk tea tasters, are emerging, enriching the concept of flexible employment and providing new employment options for more people.

Despite the rapid development of on-demand home cooking, the industry still faces challenges, the report said. One major issue is the lack of standardization and regulation in the market. Unlike traditional restaurants, which are subject to strict health and safety regulations, on-demand home-cooking services remain unregulated, which has raised concerns about food safety and hygiene, as well as security for both chefs and consumers, and further market regulations are expected to address the problem.