Guest Post: How to Start Food Delivery Services in Your Area

Ordering online food is now on trend. Especially during this quarantine situation. Delivering your restaurant’s meals at your doorstep represent enormous growth in brand awareness. Food delivery services is not only limited to greasy bites and steaks. Fresh salad or just a piece of bread to your home these days.

Are you thinking of having your meals delivered? How to start? And how you can determine your delivery area? Here we are going to provide some basic information to start your food delivery services. It’s a practical step-by-step guide to decide how large your delivery area should be.

How long your customers can wait?

The first step in determining your delivery area is to consider how long your customers can wait. How soon they will get their order delivered at doorstep. You probably won’t make your customers happy if they have to wait for two hours for their food. The same applies to restaurant when you deliver at home. You actually want to get the food to the customer’s home as soon as possible – but speed isn’t the only factor at play!

Consider your budget

How much are you willing to invest in a delivery service? Delivery by bicycle is cheaper than by car, but your delivery area decreases drastically. In addition, environmental friendliness also plays a role nowadays. People prefer to order from a company with a small ecological footprint, than from a large polluter.

Deliver Fresh and Healthy Food

Finally, it is important that you know how long your food will last. Nobody likes to be offered cold food, not even your customers. Therefore, adjust your delivery time and area to the food you want to deliver. This is of course custom and differs per restaurant.

Reach your Customers

Your delivery area depends on where you are located. Do you have a restaurant in a village outside the Sugar Land? Then you may need a large delivery area to reach sufficient customers. If you are located in the heart of Amsterdam, you need a smaller delivery area for the same customer reach.

So it is important to find out where you are located and how many customers you want to reach. Do you only want to serve local customers, or do you want to expand your customer base to surrounding villages and cities? This has a major impact on the delivery method and the delivery area you need.

Who will deliver your restaurant’s meals?

Don’t be afraid to outsource food delivery to a delivery service. Besides that this can give your name recognition a helping hand, it also saves you a lot of work. Delivery services such as UberEats are specialized in food delivery, they can certainly benefit your delivery area. You can also start your own delivery service with advanced managed software like UberEats Clone. This way you can of course also choose to have your food delivered by your own staff.

You then have complete control over the delivery method. In addition, it comes across as more personal to customers if they can order directly from you instead of from a large delivery company.

Do you already have an active delivery service?

If you already deliver meals to your home, purchasing apps like UberEats clone may be helpful to analyze your current delivery area. If you deliver 90% of your deliveries within a radius of 3km, but use a delivery area of 5km, it may be interesting to reduce your delivery area. This way you can guarantee better quality and combine more journeys. In addition, the few long trips you receive do not jeopardize the planning.

If you deliver a large part of your deliveries to the edge of your delivery area, it may be worth increasing your delivery area. This way you can generate more orders and of course combine more orders.