JULY 10 – Asian American online grocery stores and delivery services in the United States are growing and reshaping eating habits, as more rare food from the East becomes available in the West with the click of a mouse.
The stores Weee!, Yamibuy and Fantuan, with many others, have seen tremendous growth as they vie to become the leading destination for Asian food, beverages and groceries.
Weee!, an online grocery store, sells food from several cultures, including Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, delivering fresh groceries to 18 states and dry goods to 48 states.
Since the site launched in 2015, it has specialized in getting hard-to-find and authentic ingredients for customers. The Weee! app serves hundreds of thousands of households, the business said.
Founded by Larry Liu, the company is headquartered in Fremont, California. Most of the platform’s customers are Asian, including many first-generation immigrants. In 2021, the private, venture capital-backed company was valued at $2.8 billion, according to Forbes.
Weee! also markets itself on WeChat to appeal to Chinese customers and encourages its shoppers to upload videos of meals they made with the company’s food.
Nielsen researchers found that Asian Americans, native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in the US collectively have $1.3 trillion in buying power or disposable income.
The online grocery stores serving this specific demographic are able to target the estimated 2.38 million Chinese people who live in the US as of 2021 and nearly 300,000 Chinese students in the country, figures from the US State Department show.
Fantuan is the largest food delivery app focused on Chinese-speaking customers in North America and Australia. Its annual revenue was forecast to be $100 million last year, Tech Crunch reported.
While the app initially focused on restaurant food delivery, it is now shifting to grocery…
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