Baemin in Crisis: Focusing on Delivery Quality and Restaurant Owner Growth This Year

Key Priorities for 2026:
Strengthening Core Competitiveness and Supporting Restaurant Owners’ Growth

Baemin has announced that this year, it will focus on improving delivery quality and supporting the growth of restaurant owners. The company’s strategy is to return to the basics to overcome the crisis posed by tightening regulations, such as the proposed cap on commission fees, and intensifying competition from rival platforms closing in on its market share.

According to the delivery industry on January 8, Woowa Brothers, the operator of Baemin, has set two core priorities for this year: strengthening its fundamental competitiveness and building a platform to support restaurant owners’ growth using technology. At the ‘Baemin Partner Festa’ held last month, Chief Product Officer Baek Inbeom shared these directions with partner merchants, and since then, the company has been working to flesh out concrete execution strategies.

First, Baemin has made improving delivery quality and customer service (CS) its top priority for the year. Although the delivery market has grown, the number of riders has decreased, making delivery delays and declining service quality industry-wide challenges. To address these issues, Baemin is refining its dispatch system and offering enhanced benefits to ‘heavy riders’-those who handle a large volume of orders-to improve rider acceptance rates. After testing this approach in Bundang, Seongnam and Gwacheon in Gyeonggi Province, the rider acceptance rate increased by 30% compared to previous levels. The proportion of orders delayed by more than 60 minutes also decreased, staying below 1% of all orders.

Baemin is also working to reduce food preparation waiting times, which refers to the time riders spend waiting for food at restaurants. The company now allows merchants to set their food preparation completion times in five-minute increments and has introduced a feature that suggests optimal completion times by considering store conditions, delivery density, and rider availability. In the future, Baemin plans to allow merchants to set preparation times in one-minute increments. Additionally, the company is upgrading the maps used by riders and optimizing pickup routes to enable more accurate predictions.

The company is also enhancing customer service quality. By increasing and streamlining customer center staff, Baemin raised its rate of responding to customer inquiries within 30 seconds from about 65% in October last year to 99% in November, and has maintained this level since. This year, Baemin plans to further upgrade customer-facing features, such as automatically sending notifications and coupons in case of delivery delays, and enabling immediate order cancellations when dispatch is difficult due to bad weather.

The second pillar of Baemin’s strategy for this year is to accelerate the development of a platform that supports restaurant owners’ growth. The company aims to introduce digital tools, including artificial intelligence (AI)-based analytics, to help merchants operate more efficiently and attract new customers, as well as manage regulars. At last month’s Baemin Partner Festa, CEO Kim Beomseok stated, “We will spare no effort in providing support and investing in technology to foster the expectation that partners can grow through Baemin,” and added, “We will advance partner-oriented services, actively adopt AI features, and create an environment where merchants can focus solely on their business, while expanding diverse growth opportunities.”

To this end, Baemin has recently improved its platform so that merchants can view previously scattered information-such as store sales, advertising effectiveness, and order status-on a single screen. The company is also testing a feature in parts of Songpa District, Seoul, where AI analyzes review data for positive and negative keywords to provide merchants with actionable insights. This year, Baemin plans to offer merchants enhanced customer management tools to distinguish between new, regular, and lost customers, and to support customized marketing activities such as targeted coupon distribution.

A Baemin representative said, “This year, we will further strengthen delivery and customer service quality, and leverage AI technology to lay the foundation for restaurant owners’ stable growth. We will ensure that every service provided through the Baemin platform is designed to support restaurant owners.”