廚房用鍋具（K.PAL）- 台灣共享廚房應用

Abstract

There have been a number of commercial kitchens and kitchen spaces that are being rented out in Taiwan mostly for cooking classes, team building activities or parties. Despite this trend, there has not been movement towards matching individuals who can and want to cook with kitchens fit for individual and short-term use such as residential kitchens. Thus Kitchen Pots and Ladles (K.PAL) has been conceptualized in order to cater to this gap in the Taiwanese market. K.PAL is an online platform that matches cooks with kitchen owners. A survey was conducted in order to see if K.PAL has potential and the survey was divided into a survey for cooks and a survey for kitchen owners. There were 150 respondents for cooks and 83.33% (125) said that they are willing to use other’s kitchen. Out of the 125 that said that they are willing to use other’s kitchen, 65.60% (82) said that they are even willing to use other’s kitchen. Unfortunately, the survey for kitchen owners did not provide a similar result since out of the 115 kitchen owner respondents, only 24.35% (28) said that they are willing to rent out their kitchen to others. The reasons behind this are due to privacy and safety concerns, cleanliness, broken tools and equipment, and specialized kitchens (vegetarians only). K.PAL will therefore need to address these concerns in order for kitchen owners to be attracted to list their kitchens into K.PAL. Some features that K.PAL has is that both cooks and kitchen owners will have a rating system based on their past transactions with K.PAL thus kitchen owners, along with cooks can be able to see how trustworthy or reliable either the cooks or the kitchen owners will be. At the same time, there will be a security button for both cooks and kitchen owners that are linked to the Taiwan police in case something unfortunate happens during the time of kitchens being used. With regard to cleanliness, there will be cleaning fees determined by kitchen owners which can be removed if the cooks are willing to clean after themselves. With regard to broken (or missing) tools and equipment, there will be deposit for damages fee that will be charged against the cooks in the event that some tools and equipment have been damaged during the duration of the kitchen use. Cooks and kitchen owners also have the capability to communicate with one another once a kitchen has been reserved in order to talk about restrictions and other considerations (such as being a vegetarian only kitchen and the like). In addition, any time before confirmation, cooks and kitchen owners can cancel the reservation if they feel that there is something wrong with the transaction. Apart from the features of K.PAL there is no direct competition for K.PAL in Taiwan. Indirect competitors are commercial kitchens and kitchen spaces. Thus K.PAL will then be the pioneer in Taiwan and will be hoping to take advantage of being the first mover. K.PAL’s value proposition for cooks will be finding a kitchen that fits their needs. The value proposition for kitchen owners is to earn passive income from responsible and trustworthy cooks that will take care of their kitchen. This will thus create an ecosystem of trustworthy and responsible cooks matched with kitchens that these cooks desire and need to use; something that cannot be easily transferrable or copied when a new entrant tries to go against K.PAL. Based on the survey, the majority of the respondents for both cooks and kitchen owners are between single and employed individuals aged 25 – 34. This age group uses the internet and social media more often compared to other age groups and have the capacity to purchase. Thus K.PAL will utilize social media (Facebook, Instagram) and instant messaging apps (Line, WeChat) in order to create awareness and then further advertise itself in Yahoo and Google. It is also noteworthy to see that the most shopped product online are kitchenware, bathroom and cleaning materials. Thus K.PAL will also create awareness in home shopping websites such as Yahoo! Shopping, Momo Shopping and PC Home. In addition, apart from academic lessons, the other top viewed lessons on e-learning websites are cooking lessons. Thus K.PAL will also create awareness by tapping into these E-learning websites such as YouTube and the like. K.PAL will start small with having a CEO/CFO, programmer, sales and marketing personnel until the sixth month of operations. K.PAL will then add a business acquisition (kitchen owners acquisition), payments and accounting and partnership (partners such as groceries, supermarkets, etc. acquisition) personnel after the sixth month. K.PAL will either be incorporated as a limited liability company to give flexibility of having the owner as a foreigner or a local Taiwanese partner will be sought in order to have more advantages. In order to incorporate a company in Taiwan without a local Taiwanese partner, a NTD 1,000,000 initial capital is recommended but in order to have sufficient cash to prevent a negative cash flow, NTD 1,700,000 is required for an initial capital. K.PAL will be self-financed and no liabilities will be acquired based on the forecasts. There will be a commission of around 10% per hour of booking (subtracted from kitchen owner proceeds) and 10% booking fee for each hour of booking (added to payment by cook). The average revenue K.PAL will acquire is pegged at NTD 40. Thus, K.PAL will breakeven at around year 3 month 11.