The cooperation between these two leaders at different ends of the chain is a practical example of how digital technology can empower the traditional restaurant industry.
Food Supply Chain SaaS company Guanmai Tech (Chinese: 观麦科技) announced the completion of a Series C financing round of hundreds of millions of CNY, led by Hualala (Chinese: 哗啦啦). In addition, Hualala invested nearly CNY 200 million (USD 30.52 million) to acquire Guanmai's old shareholders' equity and became Guanmai Tech's new shareholder.
The money will be mainly used to enhance technology and build up service teams across China, said Yang Wei, chairman of Guamai Tech.
Guanmai Tech was founded in 2014 and its business covers fresh produce distribution, central kitchen system, and food safety traceability. Guanmai Tech focuses on providing digital transformation solutions for companies in the agricultural distribution field and helping traditional distribution firms to transform and upgrade.
Founded in 2009, catering SaaS provider Hualala focuses on providing full process solutions for restaurants from front-end cashier to back-end supply chain. At present, Hualala has served more than 400,000 restaurant merchants, and the total annual transactions of these merchants exceed 700 billion CNY (USD 104 billion).
Tudin, CEO of Hualala, said that Hualala's vision is to become a promoter of China's food and beverage industrialization and a builder of infrastructure platforms. Guanmai Tech has been operating in the B2B ingredient delivery industry for many years and has accumulated a large number of business customers in ingredient supply chain. Therefore, this strategic cooperation between the two sides can shorten the transaction path between upstream ingredient suppliers and terminal catering companies, thus realizing an efficient link between catering supply and demand.