Restaurant POS questionnaire
5 Questions to Ask Before Offering Restaurant Food Delivery
Have you noticed the shift in your margins and in your customer needs? As restaurant owners, we need to take advantage of the trends that are changing our industry and grow our profits by making just a few adjustments in order to capture 100% of the market.After all, if you do nothing now, by 2020, you will only be catering to 30% of consumers according to the NRA.I started my company Fit2Go, a healthy meal delivery service, in 2004 when I was 24. As a Gen Y, I saw the opportunity early on and entered the market ahead of the curve. The model is now popping up everywhere, currently considered the darling of the financial market and declared the future of the restaurant industry. More than half a billion venture capital dollars went into food delivery startups last year; that’s more than triple the amount invested in the previous year.But before you start offering restaurant delivery services to your customers, you need to remember that adding a delivery component adds more complexity—and with more complexity comes more important decisions you need to make. To make the process easier for you and to help you determine the right course of action for your business, I’ve compiled a 5-point delivery checklist questionnaire based on my experience.1. Why should I consider adding delivery to my model?
As I mentioned before, 70% of all restaurant foot traffic will be outside the restaurant by 2020! This is a trend you can’t ignore. This does not mean that the people will stop coming to your restaurant. It just means that millenials do not like to cook and are considered the “now” generation. They will continue to dine out twice or three times per week socially, but they need their breakfast, lunch and dinner for every other day made fast, convenient and readily available. Even if after going through this 5-point list, delivery is not for you… please consider takeout, curbside pick-up, adding a food truck, or any future off-premise model on top of your current model to capture this market.2. Should I use a third party delivery company?
The restaurant industry is changing fast and we are doing close to nothing about it as restaurant owners. Most of the solutions are coming from technology and marketing companies like Amazon, PostMates, Eat24, Grubhub, Uber, DeliveryDudes, etc.These companies sell themselves as marketing for your restaurant, but in the end, their clients are not yours and they place you in direct competition with other restaurants. They charge their clients a delivery fee and negotiate a part of your food cost depending on your volume. Why are restaurants giving away their margins to middlemen?The answer depends on the demand your food business has for delivery, as well as how much time you have to put into your delivery plan. In regards to your menu, if you cater to a specific lifestyle niche (vegetarian, organic, kosher, X Diet, family dinners, gluten or dairy free, etc), you can create sticky customers that order from you 3+ times per week. In that case, it would make more sense to have your delivery in-house. If you don’t have the time or demand for delivery, you can at least save money by using a restaurant delivery system integrated with your POS.As restaurant owners, we need to understand what the shift is and be able to cater to the market. Let’s stop giving our margins away to others. It is time for us to boost our margins and understand what our customers want. Maybe you can even create a lifestyle menu from your current menu without changing a thing.3. What’s the best way to get food from my restaurant to my customers?
This will depend on your clients and what they need from you as their food supplier. Make sure to ask your best customers what alternative would work for them and see if it makes sense for your business. The most common options are:- Routes, which are best for lifestyle restaurants that have sticky clients (like Fit2Go) and deliver daily / weekly food to customers
- Back and forth delivery, which is good for companies that want to dispatch an employee when a delivery order comes because they don’t necessarily have a high demand for delivery. Examples of this are pizzeria or Chinese delivery companies.
- Pick-up locations, which often work well for companies that deliver mass quantities of food for a specific crowd, like in gyms, supermarkets or schools.
- On-demand delivery providers, which are useful for restaurants that don’t receive many delivery orders and thus don’t need a dedicated delivery driver in the restaurant at all times
