Mealku--a food sharing social platform

Today I came across this very interesting social sharing website. We’ve heard of accommodation sharing, car sharing, now it comes to food sharing. MealKu is based on a very new but fun concept—sharing home-made food. This is truly a c2c platform. Branded as “Homemade Meal Cooperative”, MealKu contains the following highlights I discovered from my brief browsing:

1.       Ku point: a very smart way of using points as a CRM method. Point system is not new, but MealKu makes it more fun. Ku point has the similar pronunciation as coupon, and cool point, a smart name isn’t it; members build Ku points, spend Ku points, and can get cash back rewards with enough Ku points; members can buy Ku directly with cash if they don’t have enough time/effort to earn it; they can use Ku to go to events, do delivery, gifting, and literally anything you can think of doing on this website.

2.       Various incentives: the most direct incentives are cash backs. For example, members can get $30 when they earn a total of 100Ku or more in a month, or as much as $1000 when they earn a total of 1000Ku or more in a month.

3.       KOLs: of course, KOLs are important especially for a social website like MealKu. MealKu opening recruits community leaders by offering incredible social and financial incentives to start their own MealKu in their neighborhood.

4.       Target: at brief glance, it seems like MealKu targets people who loves food/cooking, who have a little bit of free time, who cares of the food they eat, probably age 28—50, lives in they city.

5.       Limitations and how to solve it: the geographic limitation. The reason the MealKu support community leaders, is that food sharing only works within certain distance, and obviously it works best within a community. Essentially the users will be consists of users from different communities of the city. Therefore community leaders as KOLs are very important in building the awareness and driving action.

Essentially, this is an online social sharing website which connects people online and brings the connections offline, and creates an online—offline—online ecosystem. And the content is FOOD. Talking about co-creation. This food sharing website has lots worth studying.