Taking your venue from dine-in only to delivery
No doubt about it: the past three years has seen a spike in the uptake of delivery apps by both venues and customers. Unable to go out, hungry Aussies opted to dine at home, in a big way. This demand saw an explosion in ordering and delivery apps, leaving venue owners spoiled for choice.
Venues relied on this revenue to make it through the difficult days of the pandemic and it boosted hospitality industry revenue streams at a precarious time. But revenue boosts don’t always translate to sustainable profits for venue owners. The proliferation of delivery apps, all taking a bite out of a venue’s bottom line, can actually amount to cash left on the table if venues aren’t optimised for success and owners aren’t able to keep pace.
Luckily, Doshii helps venues clear their plate by keeping things simple, streamlined and profitable when it comes to delivery apps. Some of our customers have seen fantastic results and have kindly offered some helpful tips for other venue owners ready to harness the power of delivery apps for the first time. Here are our top four!
1. As with the perfect restaurant meal, timing is everything
Just like whipping together the perfect meal in your venue and getting everything on the table in perfect sync, being able to manage your time is essential. Venue owners need to understand how long it takes to prepare an order and how long a typical delivery partner will take to get it into the hot little hands of a hungry customer. This last bit is particularly crucial. There’s no point having an item on your menu if it won’t hold up for the delivery journey. Even if a customer isn’t able to access your venue, you want them to get the best possible experience of it, with optimum flavour and presentation in every meal. That’s why it’s important to set your delivery radius carefully.
2. Mise en Place for success
Ask any chef or kitchen worker about the importance of Mise en Place and you’re sure to be treated to a well-worn monologue of keeping everything “in its place.” In a kitchen, it means having everything prepped and ready to keep the flow of the kitchen streamlined and successful while cooking – and this now applies to managing your delivery operations too. It’s crucial that venues make sure their kitchen is designed to support the workflow of this new pillar of their business, with ample prep, packaging and dispatch space optimised and ready to go. It’s even worth considering hiring team members to manage delivery only – a short term investment that will pay efficiency dividends.
3. Let data do the heavy lifting
In our digital age, data is the best way to increase efficiencies in your kitchen. Analysing what your customers are ordering, when they’re ordering it and across which apps can make a huge difference in both stock logistics and menu planning. With Doshii, your venue’s key data can be centralised into a single dashboard via your POS, saving you time and allowing you to streamline and optimise decision-making for your venue.
4. Delivery with care
The last step: consider whether or not you want to use a delivery partner to manage your deliveries for you, or whether this is something you’ll manage in-house. Doshii can help here, with apps like Yello and iHound (which you find among our huge buffet of hospo apps in our App Marketplace) available to help you assign orders and manage a whole fleet of drivers. All of this data can easily be centralised with Doshii’s help, so you can make tweaks and optimise your operations over time.
These tips are a great way to get your restaurant’s, cafe’s (or even your bar’s!) ordering and delivery operations off on the right foot so you can find out what works best for you. It’s a brave – and delicious! – new world for hospo, so best get ready to meet it head-on!
Got any questions about how to create a delivery operations strategy for your venue? We’d love to help. Get in touch today.
