Case Study: How FormPay helped a viral food startup increase sales by 20%
Written by: Melody Ma
Founder, FormPay
Updated: Oct 7, 2024
Published: Oct 7, 2024
Half and Half is a fusion cuisine startup that works out of a commissary kitchen in Vancouver, Canada. It offers its signature mango dessert called mango mochi that’s gone viral on social media. We sat down with June, the co-founder of Half and Half to talk about how FormPay helped streamline their order management and increased their food sales by 20%.
The story behind Half and Half – and its viral dessert
I’m a fan of fusion-style food, a cuisine that blends together different culinary traditions to create something completely new. You won’t see them much around Vancouver, where I live, and the few that you can find are very pricey. By starting Half and Half, I wanted to give an affordable option for people who love fusion cuisine like me.
The idea for Half and Half’s specialty mango mochi desserts came from two places — I’ve always enjoyed making mochis, a sweet Japanese rice dessert, for myself and my family because we all love eating cream mochis. The other half comes from mango sago dessert, one of my favorite desserts.
One day I had the idea of combining the two of them, which no one had ever done before, and it turned out to be one of the most delicious fusion foods I’ve ever made, and the internet agreed.
The challenges of using Google Forms for taking orders
We make our mango mochi desserts from a commissary kitchen in South Vancouver. Most of our sales are from viral social media posts.
Every time we went viral, we needed a way to collect orders. Initially, we used a Google Form for people to buy the dessert as we had a limit to the number of desserts we could make per day and needed our customers to order ahead.
However, Google Forms didn’t have payment options, so we had to get our customers to manually pay us by bank transfer and then manually confirm their order, which made order reconciliation and payments tedious for both our customers and ourselves.
How FormPay helped Half and Half take off
Then we discovered FormPay. FormPay had all the features we needed. Our customers are able to order themselves and pay in advance with a credit card, so that we no longer have to worry about who paid us and who didn’t.
One of my favorite features of FormPay is that both my customers and I get automatic confirmation emails for every order — making it very convenient and easy to use for everyone.
I’ve saved so much time since moving from Google Form to FormPay since I no longer have to manually take down customer information and order details anymore on top of payment reconciliation.
After we switched to FormPay, we increased our sales by 20%, and orders have been pouring in every day.
Half and Half’s mango mochi dessert goes viral on social media all the time, so having a direct FormPay order link makes it all the more convenient that people can easily order online.
"I’ve saved so much time since moving from Google Form to FormPay — no more manual order reconciliation!"
"After we switched to FormPay, we increased our sales by 20%, and orders have been pouring in every day."
Advice for food businesses starting out
I have two pieces of advice for other people who want to try selling specialty items: Firstly, remember to use a lot of photos or videos of your products to advertise them, since it’s a lot easier to catch people’s attention with delicious and beautiful visuals of your food.
Secondly, use an easy ordering system like FormPay to take your orders — it’ll save so much time for both you and your customers, while making you more money at the same time!
"FormPay had all the features we needed. Our customers are able to order themselves and pay in advance with a credit card, so that we no longer have to worry about who paid us and who didn’t."