The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2022
Ele.me's 'Free-Order Minute' riddle game frees 3.5M orders in six weeks
Daily riddles hide the free minute: guess the time, order in that minute, and Ele.me pays — 3.5M orders freed by early August 2022.
Ele.me (饿了么)
What it had to solve
In the summer of 2022, food-delivery demand in China was slow after COVID lockdowns, and Ele.me — the number-two platform behind Meituan — wanted to revive orders without charging restaurants more. Plain coupons and red packets had become background noise, so the marketing team looked for a format that would make the discount itself worth talking about.
How it works
In the summer of 2022, Chinese cities were just reopening after COVID lockdowns and food-delivery orders had not snapped back. Ele.me, Alibaba's delivery platform and the market's second player, needed a promotion that would pull demand to restaurants without asking merchants to pay for it. Its answer was not a bigger coupon but a game: every day it published a riddle, and the answer was a time of day.
Anyone who worked out the clue and placed an order inside that exact minute could have the order refunded. The first edition ran from 21 June 2022; from the second phase the refund was capped at ¥56 per order, with a maximum of one win per user per day. Puzzles drew on astronomy, chemistry, history and current events, and later phases let cities vote for their own rounds, added random-minute draws and invited the public to submit questions.
The game did what a discount alone could not: people solved the riddles in chat groups, on social media and at work. Ele.me said the first ten days refunded more than 956,000 orders across 47 rounds involving over 300,000 merchants, with juice and tea shops seeing orders double or triple on category days. By 3 August 2022 the count had grown to 3.5 million free orders and more than 600,000 participating merchants, according to The Paper's account.
The ripple effects were measurable and visible: #饿了么免单# accumulated over 3.7 billion Weibo reads by 2 August, the topic reached the top of Weibo's hot-search list on launch day, and Ele.me's app climbed to No. 6 on the iOS free chart. Within weeks, JD.com and Meituan shipped similar guess-the-time and random-free-order mechanics, confirming that Ele.me had found a promotional format the whole category would copy.
Why it lands
- A discount became a collective puzzle: strangers solved riddles together in chat groups, so the promotion spread through conversation rather than paid reach.
- The mechanic pulled demand into specific minutes, letting restaurants anticipate surges; tea shops on category days saw orders double or nearly triple.
- A ¥56 cap kept per-order cost predictable while the game generated attention that a conventional subsidy could not buy.
- Because puzzles kept changing themes, the promotion stayed fresh for weeks and evolved through five phases instead of burning out.
- Rivals JD.com and Meituan copied the format within weeks, evidence that the interaction, not the budget, was the transferable idea.
What it did
In its first ten days the campaign refunded more than 956,000 orders across 47 rounds involving over 300,000 merchants, and by 3 August 2022 the count reached 3.5 million free orders with more than 600,000 merchants benefiting. The topic #饿了么免单# had drawn over 3.7 billion Weibo reads by 2 August, hit Weibo's main hot-search list on launch day, the app rose to No. 6 on the iOS free chart, and JD.com and Meituan launched near-identical guess-the-time promotions within weeks.
What you can take
Make the money secondary: when the discount is hidden behind a puzzle people solve together, the promotion turns into shareable content — and a ¥56 cap still produces national conversation.
Since then
Ele.me ran at least five phases through the summer of 2022, adding city-vote rounds, random-minute draws and public question submission. It also drew criticism: some users found the most obscure riddles contrived, black-card members complained about missing exclusive rounds, and city-vote formats sparked regional arguments. The format proved reusable — JD.com launched a guess-the-time promotion on 28 July 2022 and Meituan began random free orders per three orders on 31 July — and riddle-style free orders became a recurring summer fixture on Ele.me in later years.
Sources
- 饿了么“免单1分钟”十天免单95.6万单 商家：生意复苏增长“不止1分钟” (Ten days, 956,000 free orders: merchants say the recovery lasts longer than one minute)
- 一场“猜答案免单”，怎么打破餐饮商户的经营折叠？ (How a guess-the-answer free-order game broke restaurants out of their slump)
- 饿了么“黑红”免单1分钟，能挽回流失用户的心吗？ (Ele.me's controversial Free-Order Minute: can it win lapsed users back?)
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