To accelerate the speed of service across its virtual kitchens, Just Kitchen deployed its all-in-one food management system and data analytics operations on Google Cloud — reducing operating costs while enhancing operational efficiency and service quality.
Google Results
- Supported exponential data growth with Cloud SQL
- Saved 30% in operating costs using custom virtual machines on Compute Engine
- Maintained near-zero service interruptions during a 10x traffic surge with Cloud Load Balancing
- Accelerated content delivery with Cloud CDN to support a seamless online ordering experience
Reduced food preparation time by 20%
Food delivery services are growing in popularity around the world, especially in densely populated places like Taiwan. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan's food delivery market achieved a year-on-year growth rate of 293.78%. While enjoying the convenience of delivery, consumers also want their food to arrive hot and fresh — just as it would be at a restaurant — along with a wide variety of menu choices.
Just Kitchen is on a mission to meet these consumer demands for quality and variety. Founded in 2019, the company operates virtual kitchens housing multiple food and beverage brands, offering a diverse range of quality meals with fast delivery. It has built a streamlined fulfillment process that ensures orders are prepared in the shortest possible time and dispatched from the kitchen closest to the customer. Just Kitchen launched first in Taiwan before rapidly expanding to Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan. Today, it partners with dozens of restaurant brands, operates its own proprietary delivery brands, and processes over 200,000 orders every month.
"We want customers to have a wide variety of choices and always receive hot, fresh food. We currently guarantee an average delivery time of 20 minutes, and customers can mix and match items from different brands in a single order."
— Michael Liu, Executive Vice President, Just Kitchen
To continuously improve service quality and gain a deeper understanding of customer preferences, Just Kitchen integrated all its management systems — spanning supply chain, enterprise resource planning, point-of-sale, and online ordering — into a single platform called JKOS. This unified approach allows Just Kitchen to improve operational efficiency across all its virtual kitchens and consolidate all business data in one place, making it readily available for data-driven decision-making.
Just Kitchen chose to deploy JKOS on a public cloud platform to achieve the scalability needed for future growth. After evaluating its options, it selected Google Cloud for its strong compatibility between data analytics tools and third-party software, as well as its cost-effective infrastructure.
「Delivering an exceptional food delivery service means we rely heavily on data analytics to improve operational efficiency and reduce preparation times. Having powerful data analytics tools is critical to us — and Google Cloud delivers exactly that.」
— Michael Liu, Executive Vice President, Just KitchenUsing Data Analytics to Elevate Food Delivery Service Quality
Google Cloud partner GAIA Information Technology provided Just Kitchen with architectural design guidance and technical recommendations on cloud product selection, helping the company build and deploy the JKOS platform on Google Cloud within just six months, launching in May 2022.
Just Kitchen now uses Cloud SQL to store all sales, customer, and supply chain data, and leverages BigQuery in combination with third-party software to run data analytics — improving operational efficiency and deepening its understanding of customer preferences.
To minimize delivery times, Just Kitchen uses Google Maps Platform to estimate delivery durations and assign the nearest virtual kitchen to fulfill each order. Address and delivery data from Google Maps Platform is regularly exported to Cloud SQL for further analysis.
Michael Liu noted that storing and processing all data on Google Cloud has brought far greater data visibility, making it much easier for the Just Kitchen team to identify bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement. For example, Cloud SQL's data retrieval capabilities allow Just Kitchen to quickly gather data on the time taken at each step of the order fulfillment process — enabling deep analysis to pinpoint where improvements can be made. As a result, the team successfully reduced the average meal preparation time per order from ten minutes to eight minutes.
"Centralizing all our business data in Cloud SQL and BigQuery has allowed us to dramatically improve delivery service quality and operational efficiency. Cloud SQL's high scalability also makes it easy to manage 10–20x data volumes when we launch new services. No matter how fast our business grows, we can execute data-driven strategies without any friction."
— Michael Liu, Executive Vice President, Just Kitchen
Reducing Operating Costs with Custom Virtual Machines on Compute Engine
"As a startup, we want to use our budget effectively and invest as much as possible into improving our service. The cost-effective infrastructure offered by Compute Engine lets us run our platform smoothly without paying for resources we don't need." He said.
Ensuring an Exceptional User Experience with Cloud Load Balancing and Cloud CDN
Since its founding, Just Kitchen has experienced rapid and sustained business growth. When the Taiwanese government announced dine-in restrictions due to the pandemic, orders on Just Kitchen's system surged tenfold overnight. By using Cloud Load Balancing to distribute traffic across servers, Just Kitchen has been able to maintain near-zero service interruptions even during unexpected traffic spikes — including surges driven by bad weather.
Just Kitchen also uses Cloud CDN to speed up the online ordering experience. Before adopting Cloud CDN, the team ran a comparative test and found that it offered faster and more stable connectivity than competing solutions. Google Cloud's expansive global network has also allowed Just Kitchen to maintain consistent content delivery speeds across all countries as it expands beyond Taiwan, enabling smooth cross-regional data transfer.
"Minimizing downtime and processing online orders quickly are at the heart of delivering a great user experience — and that's what keeps customers coming back. Cloud Load Balancing and Cloud CDN give us the reliability and speed we need during unexpected traffic surges and as we expand into new markets." — Michael Liu, Executive Vice President, Just Kitchen
Streamlining the Data Pipeline to Unlock the Full Value of Data
"Google Cloud's high-performance cloud infrastructure and data analytics tools have allowed us to rapidly improve our virtual kitchen operations and scale our business. As we adopt more Google Cloud products going forward, we're confident we'll achieve even greater results."
— Michael Liu, Executive Vice President, Just Kitchen