Last week, culinary platform Pepper.ph secured an investment from angel fund Buko Ventures to bolster their expansion into e-commerce. A niche player in the F&B publishing space creating high-quality content like cooking tips and recipe hacks, Pepper.ph is now leveraging its audience to become a leading e-commerce platform for culinary products.
Founded in 2014, Pepper.ph quickly established itself as a rising player in the crowded field of F&B publishing, where global brands and independent bloggers compete head-on. Driven by their mission of entertaining Filipino city-dwellers with engaging food content, the publication became known as a trusted source for restaurant reviews and recipe hacks (e.g. how to recreate popular restaurant dishes at home).
Today, the landscape has shifted from print magazines and blogging sites to social media, where a vast majority of F&B-related content is consumed. And Pepper.ph has shifted with it. Eight years on, CEO Dwight Co and COO Meya Cortez have built a sizable online community for cooking culture in the country, with over 130,000 followers on Instagram. These days, their online content leans more heavily towards recipe development and kitchen tips. Multimedia production plays a pillar role as the team begins exploring TikTok and other platforms for growth. Now content creation is only one of two platforms the team operates, with e-commerce quickly becoming a hero product for Pepper.ph.
In 2020, F&B e-commerce sales in the Philippines reached $216 million, a significant leap from the total sales value of $70 million in the previous year. This figure was estimated to reach $280 million in 2021. Much of this growth is attributed to the rise of online delivery services fueled by the ongoing pandemic. But with their foray into the e-commerce space, Pepper.ph isn’t looking towards food offerings, but kitchen equipment like knives, pots, pans, and even cookbooks. They’re capitalizing on a secondary trend of home cooks investing in their own culinary journeys—a community they’ve cultivated for years.
“As the internet economy continues to expand rapidly in the Philippines, we are seeing increasing opportunities for specialist “vertical-specific” e-commerce businesses,” Buko Ventures shared in an announcement around their recent investment. “Today, even as Lazada and Shopee continue to grow, we see rapidly expanding vertical specialists like Edamama for mother and baby products, Flowerstore for flowers and gifting, and Beautymnl for beauty products.”
Aggregator marketplaces like Shopee and Lazada continue to dominate the local retail e-commerce space. As of the third quarter of 2021, Shopee was the most popular B2C e-commerce site in the Philippines, with around 74 million monthly web visitors. Coming in second was Lazada with about 39 million monthly visitors.
Despite the scale advantage of these aggregators, however, vertical marketplaces like Pepper.ph possess a unique set of advantages over their horizontal competitors. Chief among them is the ability to build a well-defined audience around their platform. Customer groups are more easily defined, streamlining marketing efforts. This also comes with the second advantage of heightened control over customer experience—each step in the transaction journey tailored towards the platform’s niche. Third, vertical marketplaces allow firms to establish brand authority through focused branding and strategic use of knowledge content.
Leveraging almost a decade of content creation in the space—as well as CEO Dwight Co’s parallel work running popular food concepts like Fowlbread through his casual restaurant group Lowbrow—Pepper.ph aims to be the leading online destination for culinary products in the Philippines. With the support of their new mentors on the Buko Ventures team and their two-pronged business of unique learning content and curated products, they hope to build a robust funnel of online audiences to e-commerce customers.
“In addition to long-term growth trends for e-commerce consumer spending as incomes grow in emerging markets like the Philippines, we see a particularly good opportunity in the cooking category as Covid lockdowns introduced many people to home-cooking as a creative hobby and form of entertainment that we think will continue even as Covid-19 restrictions hopefully end,” Buko Ventures shared.