HungerStation: Serving up a food delivery experience that puts the customer first
About HungerStation
Launched in 2012, HungerStation was the first food delivery app in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, providing customers with a fast and easy ordering experience via its mobile app. Now a part of the Delivery Hero group of food delivery companies, HungerStation has more than 35,000 partners operating in more than 100 cities in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
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Contact usHungerStation optimizes its food delivery service for stability, growth, and innovation with Google Cloud, enabling millions of customers to get the meals they love delivered directly to their homes.
Google Cloud results
- Scales up and down according to demand to keep customers satisfied at all times
- Increases daily deliveries by 2.5 times while virtually eliminating downtime for customers
- Paves the way for powerful analytics with a decentralized "data mesh" approach using BigQuery
- Accelerates time to market leading to innovative new features
Builds the foundation for a 36% YoY growth in revenues
The best food delivery services do more than transport food from one place to another. They fulfill a promise: your favorite meals from your favorite restaurants in the comfort of your own home. Enter HungerStation.
Since it launched in 2012, and before everyone, HungerStation has been a pioneer in the food delivery industry in its native Saudi Arabia. The company, which is part of the Delivery Hero group, partners with more than 35,000 restaurants to deliver meals to hungry customers in 100 cities across Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Customers can order from supermarkets, pharmacies, and other types of shops and businesses as well.
"I think we’ve grown so much because we care about our customers and what they want," says Hazem Badr, Director of Information Security at HungerStation. "We’ve invested a lot in technology and innovation, and that means we can respond very quickly to changing tastes and preferences."
In 2018, HungerStation reached an inflection point in expansion and innovation, outpacing its aging technology infrastructure. The company had experimented with Kubernetes, the highly scalable open-source container technology developed at Google, but the existing infrastructure strained to accommodate it. For its new phase of growth and development, HungerStation migrated to Google Cloud.
Eliminating downtime to stay top of mind
The technological limitations of the existing IT infrastructure made running Kubernetes clusters a complex and slow process, which considerably reduced HungerStation’s time to market for updates and new features. Even worse, the limitations began to affect the availability of the service, resulting in occasional downtime.
"We want to stay 'top of mind', and there’s a lot that goes into that,” explains Badr. "We deliver a personalized, satisfying experience and our customers need to trust that our app and service will be the best it can possibly be. Any downtime can hugely affect that trust."
HungerStation set out to find a solution that could continue to deliver high quality service as well as enabling its workers to innovate with as few limitations as possible, create new features and develop a user-friendly app experience. After months of trialing some of the most well-known cloud providers, the company chose Google Cloud.
"Of all the infrastructure options that we evaluated, Google Cloud impressed us the most with its availability, performance optimization, and state of the art security offerings," says Badr. "These factors were key to enabling HungerStation to focus on delivering excellent service and growing our business in a competitive market."
"Of all the infrastructure options that we evaluated, Google Cloud impressed us the most with its availability, performance optimization, and state of the art security offerings. These factors were key to enabling HungerStation to focus on delivering excellent service and growing our business in a competitive market."
—Hazem Badr, Director of Information Security, HungerStationEmbracing built-in scalability with Google Cloud
Once its decision was made, HungerStation moved its workloads to Google Cloud with very little disruption to its services. "The migration process was a remarkably smooth experience for us, largely due to the exceptional technical support provided by the Google Cloud team," says Badr. "They worked very closely with us in planning for a seamless transition and being proactive about any potential issues."
HungerStation’s new IT infrastructure is built around Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which manages the company’s containerized workloads. "Google Kubernetes Engine has the right combination of scalability, reliability, observability, and, above all, ease of management," says Badr. "It’s a very developer friendly solution. Instead of managing overheads, we can focus on building the best applications we can."
The Google Cloud operations suite enables HungerStation to monitor its infrastructure and deal with any potential issues very quickly, while Cloud SQL handles the company’s database needs.
Initially, following the migration, HungerStation retained its data warehouse on its previous infrastructure. But as the wider Delivery Hero group aligned itself more closely with Google Cloud, it made sense for HungerStation to follow suit. This also provided the company with the opportunity to adopt a "data mesh" approach, which relies on a decentralized data platform to break down organizational barriers and empowers consumers across the organization to extract more value from the data themselves. That wasn’t possible with HungerStation’s existing data warehouse, but BigQuery opened up new opportunities: "With our data warehouse in BigQuery, we have improved our cost efficiency, scalability, and really been able to adopt a 'data mesh' paradigm," explains Badr.
"Google Kubernetes Engine has the right combination of scalability, reliability, observability, and, above all, ease of management. It’s a very developer friendly solution. Instead of managing overheads, we can focus on building the best applications we can."
—Hazem Badr, Director of Information Security, HungerStationKeeping customer data safe
Dealing with sensitive personal data from millions of customers, security is a critical priority for HungerStation. Tools from the Google Cloud security suite including Cloud Identity and Access Management, Assured Workloads, and Cloud Data Loss Prevention have enabled Badr and his team to provide a safe, secure environment for HungerStation and its customers’ data.
In addition, the launch of a Google Cloud region in Saudi Arabia will help the company stay fully compliant with data sovereignty laws in the country. "The new cloud region means that our customers can rest assured that their data will never leave the country, and they can benefit from lower latencies," says Badr.
Rock solid reliability, accelerated growth, happier customers
With Google Cloud, HungerStation has an infrastructure that helps rather than hinders the company’s growth. Since migrating, the company has increased its daily deliveries by 2.5 times while virtually eliminating downtime on its platform. "Minimizing downtime with Google Cloud has been absolutely crucial for our continued success, and it means our customers continue to trust us with their orders. The scalability of the platform means we can also provide the same level of service when demand peaks at certain times and then scale back down," says Badr. "It’s totally changed the way we think about our technology infrastructure."
The ability to scale up and down on demand, the visibility of Google Cloud and its billing system, and the ability to offload the management of Kubernetes to GKE has added up to significant cost savings, while time to market has greatly improved. That means that HungerStation has channeled its resources into delivering a much richer user experience with more mature features on its app, such as the innovative "Find My Craving" campaign which uses data analytics and AI to help users uncover what their subconscious really desires. It has even expanded into new revenue streams with initiatives like HungerSation Market, a grocery dark store set up in the COVID-19 pandemic that gained a million users in just three years. This innovation was a first of its kind and its expansion has led to a revenue growth of 36% over 2022.
"We’ve opened up all kinds of new features, such as subscriptions, order tracking, and a new groceries service," says Badr. "Since migrating to Google Cloud, we’ve been able to respond quickly and effectively to our customers’ changing needs. I think that’s really helped to accelerate our growth as a company."
As HungerStation looks forward to the capabilities that the new Google Cloud region in Saudi Arabia will provide, Badr and his colleagues continue to evolve the platform and improve the user experience. "We’re working on lots of new initiatives with Google Cloud, but we’ve been focusing on artificial intelligence in particular," says Badr. "The capabilities we’ve seen on Google Cloud are very exciting. I think they’re going to help us completely change the game and stay ahead of the competition."
"We’ve opened up all kinds of new features, such as subscriptions, order tracking, and a new groceries service. Since migrating to Google Cloud, we’ve been able to respond quickly and effectively to our customers’ changing needs. I think that’s really helped to accelerate our growth as a company."
—Hazem Badr, Director of Information Security, HungerStationTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About HungerStation
Launched in 2012, HungerStation was the first food delivery app in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, providing customers with a fast and easy ordering experience via its mobile app. Now a part of the Delivery Hero group of food delivery companies, HungerStation has more than 35,000 partners operating in more than 100 cities in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.