What are the most important things to keep in mind when you’re a restaurant owner and want to start delivering to your customers' homes?
Are you a restaurant owner and/or manager? Do you want to deliver directly to your customers? Or do you simply want to know the main steps a restaurant needs to take to start a home delivery business?
Coming up with a plan is an essential step before starting any project.
But what aspects need to be taken into account? Should I hire delivery people? Should I rent professional kitchens? Should I outsource the delivery of meals to meal delivery companies?
We’ll explain the most important elements that you need to take into consideration when providing a home delivery service.
First of all, why should a restaurant deliver food to customers at home? Because home delivery is on the rise for several reasons:
Home deliveries are becoming more and more popular among customers.
Home deliveries boost restaurant sales.
Due to the COVID-19 crisis that forced businesses in the hospitality industry to close their doors, home delivery has become an important part of their general services.
What are the most important points to consider when offering a home delivery service? And what do you need to plan?
As a restaurant owner you must come up with a plan where you indicate how many customers you wish to reach, the quantity of raw materials you’re going to need to reach your goal and you need to mark the area where you wish to deliver your dishes.
1. Determining how many new clients you want to bring in
How many customers am I likely to attract and how much raw material do I need?
Opening a delivery service means that the amount of customers will probably increase. Therefore, the amount of raw materials you're going to need for new orders will likely be higher, which means you should calculate the quantities you’ll need in order to optimize production.
To be able to accurately assess the potential, you need to evaluate the number of people living in the designated area. But how do you determine the potential number of customers you can reach? You can consult several tools to determine it. One of these tools is Neighborhood monitoring.
Neighborhood monitoring is a website that provides precise information about the population, job market and housing in the neighborhoods of Brussels. It can also compare these neighborhoods according to socio-demographic characteristics. (http://monitoringdesquartiers.brussels/)
With this tool, you can accurately carry out your market research and efficiently estimate the percentage of people living in the designated area.
2. Determining the area where you want to deliver
In which areas could I deliver and what impact will these deliveries have on the organization of my restaurant?
This step is important and necessary because the larger the area, the more potentially new customers you’ll bring in. The flip side of the coin, though, is that a larger area requires more deliverers.
In general, three kilometers around the kitchen is held as the ideal area to deliver meals that will still be hot. This allows you to deliver hot food within 15 minutes.
As for the organization of the kitchens, we advise you to use two different preparing areas:
one for preparing regular orders and another one for preparing dishes that’ll be delivered.
You can do this within your company or rent professional kitchens from BeCook.
BeCook rents professional and individual kitchens as well as storage space.
Moreover, BeCook is located close to Tours et Taxis, in the center of Brussels (3 km from the city center) which allows you to deliver in a larger area.
3. How to manage orders and deliveries?
How to manage deliveries?
Your restaurant must be able to register orders and deliver the dishes to the customer's home. There are two possible solutions:
either deliver the food yourself or outsource deliveries to a food delivery company (Takeaway, Uber Eats, Deliveroo etc.).
Managing your own delivery
In addition, other factors must be taken into account (for example, the temperature of the delivery vehicles and the safety of your deliverers). You will also have to develop a website or an application to be able to register orders.
Using a meal delivery company
A big plus is that meal delivery companies allow you to quickly gain visibility by merely being available on their platforms. An even bigger plus is that the delivery companies take care of absolutely everything from managing the order platform to delivering the dishes.
BeCook is a company located in Brussels near Tours & Taxis that rents professional and individual kitchens and storage space at democratic prices.
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