honestbee

» see honestbee.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

honestbee was founded in Singapore on 23 July 2015 by Joel Sng, who brought in Isaac Tay and Jonathan Low as co-founders. The original product was the simplest one in the category: you picked groceries from a supermarket you already shopped at, and a courier bought them and brought them to your door. The supermarket partners were real ones, FairPrice at home and Tesco abroad, so the catalog was never the problem.

It expanded at a speed that reads strangely now. Laundry pickup arrived in September 2016 and food delivery in February 2017, both from a company that had been in business under two years. Event ticketing followed in late 2017. By 2019 there were eight markets across Asia, reaching from Malaysia up to Japan, and roughly 860 people on payroll.

honestbee never operated anywhere near me. The category did. Turkey had Yemeksepeti from 1999, years before on-demand delivery was a wave anywhere, and Delivery Hero paid 589 million dollars for it in 2015, the same year honestbee opened its doors. Watching this one from that side, the surprising part is not that it failed but that it tried eight countries before it had one that worked.

The unraveling was fast and it was visible from outside. Isaac Tay had already gone in September 2018, and Joel Sng followed him out in May 2019. That was the month the food delivery and laundry lines were suspended, with the overseas operations coming apart across the same spring. Three chief executives came through in succession after him, and by March 2020 four fifths of the staff had been retrenched.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the eight countries ~

The eight-market footprint is the part of this that explains the rest. Grocery delivery is a business of local density: the economics turn on how many orders one courier can carry inside one neighborhood in one hour, which means the unit that has to work is a postal code, not a country. honestbee was running postal codes in eight places at once while none of them had reached the density that pays.

Each market also came with its own supermarket chains to negotiate with and its own regulator to satisfy, none of which transferred from the last one. Grab and Gojek were building the same logistics across the same region with far more capital behind them, and both ended up in acquisition talks with honestbee while it was going under, which is the clearest measure of where the leverage sat.

~ the crowning jewel ~

In 2018, with the delivery business already burning, honestbee opened habitat: a large physical grocery store in Singapore with a food hall attached and automated fulfillment behind the shelves. Management called it the crowning jewel. A company that had spent three years arguing that the store should come to you built a store.

habitat closed during the pandemic and the closure became permanent. The site later reopened as a fulfillment center for RedMart, which is a competitor's warehouse, and the most fitting possible tenant.

~ the paperwork after ~

A creditor filed the winding-up application on 27 March 2020. It was gazetted on 6 April and set down to be heard on the seventeenth. The order landed in July 2020 and the liquidators at BDO opened the claims process, and the final figure owed came to S$319.9 million. Joel Sng was sued that year over allegations that company money had gone into personal property and renovations, and he was declared bankrupt in May 2022. honestbee.com answers with a hundred-byte script that hands you off to a parking lander.

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