Author’s Blurb: Truth be told, I’ve not had a fantastic experience with both dahmakan and Foodpanda’s on-demand deliveries in the past (it’s GrabFood all the way for me).
dahmakan received more funding the other day, and this combined with their previous funding rounds had me wondering something.
If they’re constantly raising enough money to carry out their operations, they must be doing something right, right?
So, I decided to put their delivery service to the test with some general expectations; to have my food come on time with the promise of their new express delivery and without complications.
Off To A Good Start
I was craving chicken on the first day, so I decided to get their salted egg butter chicken.
Right away, I came across their express delivery option, which is a little button you switch on to filter the menu items that are available for delivery within a 30-45 minute window.
As promised, they got here at 12:54PM on the dot.
So far, so good. My experience with the app was pretty straightforward, and I was a big fan of their clean, easy to navigate interface.
My food came piping hot too, which was pretty much to be expected considering one of their ‘cloud kitchens’ was located just 10-15 minutes away from my office. Plus, it tasted awesome.
A Troubling Second Order
On the second day though, things took a little turn.
I started off my second order by going for one of their meal packages, dahmakan Select (RM29/month).
With this package, you get a preferential price of all selected RM14.99 meals for only RM9.90, saving about RM5 in the process for each meal.
This is a rough breakdown.
The RM29 essentially works as a pool of money where any RM14.99 non-combo meal you buy will be discounted to RM9.90, which is then deducted from the pool. This is how my total (pictured above) was RM0.
Let’s cut back to the menu options.
Choosing a dish this time was a little more confusing. I struggled to choose a proper meal considering most of them were not available on-demand.
Turns out, on the first day I just got lucky with ordering the salted egg butter chicken (since that was already an express meal in the first place).
Their app doesn’t reflect this, so even when you enable the express feature, it shows you all available meals, not available meals on-demand.
I understand that this is in beta testing—but seriously? There were only two or three meals in total that were actually available to be sent out on-demand, and the rest would only be available from 3PM onwards.
Because of this, I could only choose the same salted egg chicken dish or a plate of their Nasi Kerabu. And yes, I went ahead with the former, again.
This was the timeline for my second order.
2:27PM: Order placed. Expected delivery time was between 2:20PM-3:20PM.
2:46PM: dahmakan tells me that another 20 minutes would have to be added onto my wait.
3:35PM: The duration is suddenly extended by another 20 minutes, making the overall delay about 40 minutes long.
3:40PM: Fed up, I angrily huff and puff my way to McDonald’s to get an Ayam Goreng lunch set to tide my hunger over.
4:06PM: My rider is finally in transit.
4:16PM: My salted egg chicken is now safely in my hands. I ended up packing it for dinner, since I already had my lunch.
At the end of it all, I calculated almost an hour in delays. Unbelievable.
It’s worth mentioning that right after they sent me the bad news about the 40-minute delay, they also asked if I wanted to cancel the order entirely.
In my frustration, I did actually text the number to cancel my order—but they ended up dispatching their rider anyway.
The Aftermath
Needless to say, I was left hangry and let down again after the whole experience.
A while after the disastrously late delivery, dahmakan ended up offering me RM5 off for my next order, but honestly speaking, I might not end up using it after all.
They also sent me this email:
In the email, they mentioned that their high turnovers within their rider fleet were a problem that continued to plague them, but when I got the message signifying a delay, the app said that my food was still being cooked by the chef.
It could be that my food was already done and not yet picked up by a rider, or the fact that I ordered it on a Friday and the sheer number of orders overwhelmed them.
I reached out to dahmakan on Facebook to see if I could find a common denominator that would explain the frequent late deliveries.
The customer rep I was put in contact with actually did take the time to help me understand the confusion instead of providing a copy-paste excuse, and I appreciated that.
But whatever the real reason was, I hope they get around to solving it fast before their entire brand’s image is just tainted with late deliveries.
I’m not the only one disappointed either; take a look at their Facebook page and you’ll see a number of comments on their posts complaining about their delivery service.
Perhaps those people are just jumping on the complaint bandwagon, but after having experienced the poor service firsthand, I can’t confidently side with dahmakan on this.
Bottom Line: I’m sorry I ever cheated on you, GrabFood. I always take you for granted, and this is what happens. To dahmakan, I’ll never say never, but I’m going to give it a while before trying it out another round. Maybe until after the next round of funding? Keep me posted.
- You can read more about dahmakan here.
