Blog Post 1: Existing Take-Away Food Delivery Services/ Industry

I researched food takeaway services in order to find the conventions of the services, and understand the industry. I did this by researching the different brands and looking at what made each company unique from the rest. Some companies that I researched into include: Deliveroo, Just Eat, One Delivery, Hungry House and Uber Eats. They can be separated into two different types of delivery service, aggregators, and new delivery. Aggregators work as middle-men, taking orders from customers and giving them to restaurants. The delivery, in this case, is the responsibility of a chosen restaurant. On the contrary, new-delivery services make the same thing, but they take full responsibility for the delivery process, building their own logistics for the best delivery. This is especially useful for those restaurants that don’t have their own drivers. This type of delivery service is becoming much more popular nowadays as it allows the customer to chose from a larger variety of restaurants giving them more choice on what food they want to eat.

A specific look at Just Eat and Deliveroo:
Just Eat is one of the leading companies in this industry, serving over 22.8 million customers around the world. One of their mission is to create the world's greatest food community, and they are already serving over 100 different types of cuisine from 87,000 restaurant partners internationally. Another aim for the company is to make food delivery an exciting experience for both the restaurant business as well as the customer. The use of their app is a great appeal for the younger generation (the main demographic) as phones are greatly intertwined into their lives and this convenience helps to create a stress-free experience. For the customer, Just Eat boasts a significant message throughout its work; choice. However, around the time of which we were doing research, there were many articles about Just Eat in the news as hygiene ratings in their app had been quite hidden and not very easy to obtain. It turns out they had many restaurants on their app that had a 0 hygiene rating which should have meant that they were shut down but Just Eat continued to provide service for them. This problem was mainly due to Just Eat's sign up system that lacked background checks on the restaurants. This allowed for some restaurants to provide food for Just Eat's customers when the restaurant should have closed down.

Deliveroo's app screenshots as seen on the Google Play Store

After being founded 12 years after Just Eat, Deliveroo is a growing competitor in the marketplace, having revenue growth of over 650% year after year. Deliveroo's aim differs from Just Eat's; Deliveroo desires to bring great food direct to customers as fast as possible, in less than 30 minutes. Restaurants who partner with them see their revenue increase by up to 30%, creating thousands of jobs in the restaurant sector. The secret behind Deliveroo's system that helps them compete with bigger companies is their ‘Frank’ algorithm. It is a predictive technology and evaluates the most efficient way of distributing orders based on the location of restaurants, riders and customers.

App and website design:

• Design of the app
• Minimalistic design, modern and attractive
• Spacious
• Bright and colourful to help connote the exciting experience
• A clear colour scheme to match the brand
• Higher end phone in all the shots, however, no phone brand is ever shown
• Actual app services:
• 3 Steps:
• Choose Food and Restaurant(s)
• Where to Deliver to
• How to Pay
• Other additional tabs include
• Offers Page
• Recommended
• Search for nearby restaurants
• Types of food tab and ratings tab
• Data and Cookies used to help the user find food that they may like

This research was extremely useful to my initial plans as they gave me ideas on what my adverts could focus on. Great food and the speed of the delivery seemed to be a very high priority for the other companies as these are the aspects of the service that reflects the company the most. The companies never talk about the prices of the food because as a delivery service, we do not have much control over the base price so this will be reflected in my advert.