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If you run a food service business in Australia or New Zealand you may be considering a pivot to delivery to take advantage of the new demand for delivered food created by COVID-19.
But there’s more than one way to approach delivery, which is important to remember as every business is unique. Beyond the challenges of COVID-19, your business will have its own unique set of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that need considering.
Here are three common delivery models to consider.
A food delivery aggregator is an online platform that compiles competing offerings and helps consumers compare them before ordering. App platforms like Uber Eats also facilitate the logistics of delivery, but many aggregators leave that part of the business to the restaurant.
Pros: Aggregator apps are incredibly popular because they offer consumers ultimate convenience. If your priority is getting in front of the most consumers in the quickest and simplest way possible, you could sign-up with an aggregator. If the aggregator offers logistics services this could also give you a turn-key delivery solution you can tag onto your restaurant.
Cons: Aggregators not only drive down prices between competing restaurants, simply by the nature of “aggregating” offers, they also typically charge a fee for being represented on their apps that need to be built into margins.
A cloud kitchen – sometimes referred to as a dark kitchen or ghost kitchen – is simply a commercial kitchen that solely works from online orders. There are no dining facilities, but there is also less cost as the facility doesn’t require the space, power or high footfall locations of a typical restaurant. Cloud kitchens can independently run their own logistics or outsource them, but the key difference is that they’ve completely jettisoned their dine-in capabilities.
Pros: Reduced costs are the big advantage, alongside location flexibility. You just need to make sure your kitchen is in a commercial zone within the area of demand for your food. You can also share the space with other food service businesses to share costs without detrimentally impacting the customer experience.
Cons: Cloud kitchens can come with the perception of having less oversight, and lower standards, compared to traditional restaurants. So you might have to work harder to attract staff, comply with authorities, and market your food safety to consumers. Setting up a cloud kitchen also removes your dine-in capabilities altogether, which is something to consider for the long-term.
As the name implies, a fully integrated model sees a restaurant control the food chain from sourcing ingredients to delivering the food to the consumer’s door. This is perhaps the traditional – or pre-aggregator – model and can be popular with restaurant owners who want to change very little about their existing operation.
Pros: Controlling every lever of the operation allows you to closely safeguard quality and food safety while managing your margins. You can act with more speed to address problems that might take longer to fix when outsourced. It also allows you to retain traditionally front-of-house staff as delivery drivers if you’re planning for your pivot to be temporary.
Cons: This is the highest cost option on a number of fronts. Not only are you running your own logistics but without an aggregator you may also need to spend more on marketing your business to get it in front of your target consumers. In a market used to online ordering, this places a greater emphasis on having a very slick digital presence whether that’s handled via a website or even your own app.
Whichever model you choose, consider the long-term impacts and where you want your business to be positioned a year or even three years from now.
COVID-19 has upturned many assumptions about what it takes to survive and succeed in hospitality in Australia and New Zealand, but many truisms – such as the continuing importance of food safety to your reputation – remain the same.
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