UCOOK, WeChat Get Together for Food Delivery in South Africa

Food delivery is a wonderful thing; instead of going out—with all that entails in expense, time and general hassle—you can have food brought to your door instead, the same quality of food that you’d get by going out. Throw in mobile payments and you’ve just made things even easier yet. That’s what South African diners have to look forward to in a new partnership between UCOOK and WeChat.

UCOOK is a new food delivery company, a rapidly-growing operation in Cape Town that offers complete gourmet food kits complete with step-by-step instructions on how to take the ingredients provided and turn these into a complete gourmet meal. Meanwhile, WeChat steps in to provide a means to pay for that complete meal kit, offering safe, secure transactions that can connect to Standard Bank ATMs or work with any chip-and-pin-enabled bank card in South Africa, reports note.

This isn’t the first such move WeChat’s made in the region, working with such firms as FitKey, OrderIn and picup. WeChat’s even started up a fund to help support African startup companies, which suggests that WeChat is eager to have its hand in the African continent’s development.

Indeed, it likely is, and for a few reasons. One, we know that the Chinese mobile payment systems—particularly Alipay but also WeChat Pay—have been aggressively targeting other countries in a bid to support the growing Chinese tourist class. The Chinese mobile payment systems, in response, are providing the necessary infrastructure to allow those tourists to pay as if they’d never left. Moreover, there have been some reports previously that China has its eye on Africa as a potential development site due to Africa’s substantial quantities of untapped natural resources. By moving in now, and offering development cash, the Chinese can be on the front line of that development.

Regardless of the ultimate outcome, it’s clear Chinese firms are getting involved just about everywhere. One extra way to get a meal delivered, as seen through this new WeChat / UCOOK development, is just one more step in that direction.