Food Panda's bet on Pakistan as its biggest market

From order-forwarder to operations company: what Food Panda actually is today

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing two guests who had been among the most requested on the show: Muntaqa Peracha, CEO of Food Panda Pakistan, and Waqas Asar, its Director of Marketing. Before either guest says a word about the business, Muzamil frames the conversation around a question the Pakistani tech and startup scene had been asking: what exactly has Food Panda become?

Muntaqa’s answer is precise. When he first visited the Food Panda office in 2019 — on a sales call for a different company — the then-CEO walked him through a transition that had already happened: the platform had moved from being a pure marketplace, where restaurants handled their own deliveries, to owning the last mile entirely. “We were on a hundred riders,” Muntaqa recalls being told. “Then we went to a thousand. And now we are at ten thousand.” That jump happened in roughly four months. It was that conversation, not a job posting, that made him want to join.

By the time of this recording, the numbers had grown further. Food Panda Pakistan lists 50,000 riders, with around 20,000 active on any given day. It operates across 35 cities, carries 18–20,000 restaurants, runs eight dark kitchens (soon ten), hosts 5,000 home chefs, and operates Panda Mart dark stores in six cities. It is, in Muntaqa’s framing, a platform with multiple distinct verticals — food delivery, home chefs, dark kitchens, virtual brands, grocery shops, and Panda Mart — each managed separately because the operational logic, the customer profile, and the economics of each are genuinely different.

Two careers that converged on the same bet

Before the business conversation begins in earnest, Muzamil spends considerable time mapping how both guests arrived at Food Panda — and the paths are instructive.

Muntaqa was born in Karachi, moved to Lahore, completed O and A levels at Aitchison, and then went to Georgia Tech for computer science, graduating in 2004. He describes the academic shock of American university life — continuous assessments, unannounced quizzes, no cramming window — as something his British-curriculum schooling had not prepared him for at all. He even failed a course after being accused of cheating in a final exam, an incident he describes as a formative lesson in standing up for yourself. After graduation he worked summers in the US, including a stint at a startup that was later acquired, before returning to Pakistan in late 2005 to join DWP Technologies, a local enterprise technology integrator. He stayed eight years, moving through product management, project management, sales, and business development. IBM followed for two years, then Inbox for four, then brief stints at Dun and Bradstreet and TPL Corp as Chief Commercial Officer. It was during a sales visit to Food Panda — trying to sell TPL Maps — that he met the then-CEO and became fascinated by the scale of what was being built.

Waqas’s route was different. A Lahori by upbringing, he studied computer science before realising his instincts were generalist rather than specialist. He joined Engro Foods as part of the team that launched Olpers — which he says has since overtaken Nestlé’s Milk Pack as the largest dairy brand in Pakistan — and then led the launch of Tarang, a tea-whitening product aimed at a mass rural audience. He describes Tarang as the brand that taught him what marketing at genuine scale feels like: “If you haven’t worked on brands that have a mass appeal, a large-scale appeal, you operate within a certain bubble.” He later spent two years at Reckitt on Dettol in Dubai, returned to Engro Foods as General Manager Marketing, and then spent seven years at Coca-Cola Pakistan, eventually becoming Marketing Director for Central Asia and the Caucasus — eight countries, based out of Almaty, Kazakhstan. He describes that posting as the most enjoyable period of his career. He joined Food Panda in 2021.

The Georgia Tech to IBM to startup question

Muzamil presses Muntaqa on a question that comes up constantly in Pakistan’s professional circles: for a computer science graduate in 2022, which path — MNC, local tech company, or funded startup — is actually the right one?

Muntaqa’s answer is structured and honest. MNCs are good for building fundamentals and getting global exposure through internal networks, but they are claustrophobic: “You have to experiment within your box. You cannot go outside.” Local technology companies offer startup-like exposure and flexibility but are trapped in a cash-flow cycle that slows everything down. Startups offer the fastest learning curve and the highest upside, but only under two conditions: the startup must be funded, and it must have co-founders or advisors who can actually mentor. “If those two things are there, go to the startup,” he says. “The learning will be faster than anywhere else.”

Later in the discussion, Waqas adds a parallel observation from the marketing side: the shift from legacy FMCG to a digital platform is less dramatic than it looks. The fundamentals — identifying occasions, building brand equity, converting awareness into purchase intent — are the same. What changes is the data density and the speed of feedback. “Data is also an overused term,” he says. “A lot of data is available. You probably don’t need that much. What matters is how you convert data into action-oriented insights and then into plans.”

The vertical stack: home chefs, dark kitchens, Panda Mart, and what shops got wrong

Muzamil asks Muntaqa to walk through the full product architecture, and the answer reveals how far the company has moved from its original positioning.

The home chef vertical — 5,000 cooks selling from their homes through the app — is treated as a separate business because the operational requirements are entirely different: food safety education, technology onboarding for people who may not be digitally fluent, and a customer base that is split between those seeking quality and those seeking price. Dark kitchens are co-working spaces for restaurants: Food Panda builds the physical infrastructure, rents stalls to restaurant brands, and enables them to expand into new neighbourhoods without capital expenditure. Virtual brands exist only on the app — Food Panda co-creates them with small restaurant partners or owns them outright.

Panda Mart, the dark-store grocery business, is the vertical Muntaqa describes as closest to the company’s heart. Food Panda contracts directly with CPG suppliers, warehouses goods in commercial areas, and delivers within a defined radius. Muzamil says he uses it aggressively — “from diapers to everything” — and finds the pricing and variety remarkable.

The shops vertical, by contrast, had a troubled start. It was launched in four days during COVID-19, using the restaurant product as a copy-paste solution. The fundamental problem was that most Pakistani retailers are not digitised: they would accept an order, then discover the item was out of stock twenty-five minutes later. “We did not have a solution from the product side,” Muntaqa says plainly. Over the past eight to twelve months, the process and strategy have been rebuilt, and the shops vertical is now, in his view, reliable. But the early failure was a lesson in the difference between speed and readiness.

The competition problem no one talks about

Waqas makes an observation that Muzamil finds striking: the absence of a major direct competitor is not an advantage — it is Food Panda’s hardest marketing challenge.

“When you have competition, multiple players are investing. Market development, demand creation — that happens automatically,” Waqas explains. Without a rival spending on category education, Food Panda carries the entire burden of convincing Pakistani consumers to change behaviour: to order rather than cook, to trust delivery rather than walk to a shop, to use an app rather than call a restaurant directly. “Our biggest competition is the homemaker who cooks three times a day,” he says. “We have to make a behavioral change.”

The marketing strategy has shifted accordingly. The previous positioning — Food Panda as a discount and deals platform — has been replaced by a convenience and choice narrative. The Pow Pow mascot campaign, which Muzamil references as a visible marker of the brand’s maturation, was a regional initiative across APAC markets, localised in Pakistan through cricket (PSL), Ramadan, and music. The Hassan Raheem collaboration was part of the music leg. Waqas describes the next phase as explaining the philosophy behind the brand — what Food Panda stands for, not just what it sells.

The recommendation engine, GDPR, and what the data actually does

Muzamil raises what he calls his personal interest area: the recommendation engine. He describes the experience of opening the app late at night, scrolling for fifteen minutes, and defaulting to McDonald’s because nothing better surfaced. He asks whether Food Panda is building the kind of contextual intelligence — time of day, occasion, user history, external signals — that would make the discovery problem disappear.

Muntaqa’s answer is candid about where the company is and where it is going. A feature called Panda Box already exists: a pop-up that offers a time-limited discount from a restaurant matched to a user’s order history. “It’s based on your user profile right now,” he says. “It doesn’t yet connect to Ramadan, or cricket, or Eid. Eventually it will.” The engineering behind this sits across four global hubs — Berlin, Istanbul, Taiwan, and Singapore — serving the entire Delivery Hero network. More than a thousand engineers work across the group, and the CEO ran a programme to recruit specifically from Apple, Meta, and similar companies.

One constraint Muntaqa is explicit about: Food Panda is governed by GDPR. Freely available third-party data cannot be used, and user data cannot be shared with external partners for product cross-selling. “I wouldn’t call it a challenge,” he says. “I’d call it a differentiation.”

Panda Wallet, fintech adjacency, and the triangle that matters

Muzamil pushes on the fintech question — whether all the transactional data Food Panda holds could become the basis for a credit product, a B2B data partnership, or a broader financial services play.

Muntaqa traces the wallet’s origin to a mundane problem: refunds on card payments took fourteen to twenty-one days, generating a constant stream of customer service incidents. The fix was simple — put the refund in a wallet immediately, recover it when the bank eventually processes the original. The wallet was never designed as a fintech product.

What he does see is a closed-loop opportunity within the rider-vendor-consumer triangle. “There is an exchange of money happening here, whether in cash or online payment,” he says. The goal is to speed up that exchange — paying riders faster, settling vendors sooner — rather than building a consumer-facing wallet product that competes with existing apps. “Right now everyone is a copycat of the other. There is no use case which is independent.” He is deliberately avoiding the EMI and wallet clutter. The fintech angle, if it comes, will emerge from accelerating money movement within Food Panda’s own network, not from selling financial products to consumers.

Electrification, B2B logistics, and the Panda Mall horizon

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil has mapped out several directions he sees the company potentially moving. Muntaqa confirms or qualifies each one.

On electric vehicles: Food Panda has already run a pilot with five bikes in Islamabad and five in Karachi, including female riders. The will to switch is there — fuel price volatility is a real operational problem, and the sustainability case is clear. The blocker is infrastructure: charging stations or swappable batteries need to exist before a fleet transition is viable. “If the infrastructure were there, we would have cut over already,” Muntaqa says.

On B2B logistics: a product called Panda Go already exists, allowing businesses to call a Food Panda rider on demand for their own deliveries. A consumer-to-consumer version — sending a package across a neighbourhood — is planned.

On Panda Mall: the shops tile was briefly renamed Panda Mall as a test. The direction is confirmed. Fashion brands and electronics are already listed. “Give it another quarter or two,” Muntaqa says. “You’ll see a huge collection of items.” The framing is not Amazon or Daraz — it is neighbourhood delivery within a five-to-six mile radius, for anything.

Profitability, Delivery Hero’s commitment, and Pakistan in 2050

Muzamil asks the question directly: given the global collapse of tech valuations and the failures visible in Pakistan’s startup ecosystem, where does Food Panda stand financially?

Muntaqa is measured but clear. Food Panda Pakistan is not yet EBITDA-neutral, but the drive toward neutrality started last year and he expects to reach it within the next year. Delivery Hero is a listed company in Germany — not a VC-backed startup facing a funding cliff. “Funds raise करना is not difficult for us,” he says. More importantly, Pakistan is not a peripheral market for the group. It is the largest country within the Food Panda brand globally, and Delivery Hero has been burning cash here for seven years precisely because the trend line is right.

Waqas adds the broader point: “Pakistan is a must-have, not a nice-to-have, for a lot of companies — given the scale, the youth population, the growth ambitions.”

On the 2050 question — how do they see Pakistan in twenty-eight years — both guests are genuinely optimistic, and both ground their optimism in the same observation. Pakistani professionals, in their experience across multiple geographies and nationalities, are not outclassed by anyone. “In a lot of scenarios, our people are much better,” Muntaqa says, “because we grew up in a tougher environment. We know how to navigate situations that others haven’t had to face.” Waqas echoes this but adds the caveat that defines his answer: “The combination of knowledge, experience, articulation, hardworking nature, street smartness — I have genuinely not seen that in one individual elsewhere. The variable that determines whether it compounds or dissipates is the value system. Integrity. Staying on the straight path and not deviating from it.” That, he says, is the one thing Pakistan needs to hold onto.