Today, anyone who wants to satisfy their cravings just needs to open an online food delivery application, browse through the menu, choose the dish they want, and go through the checkout process. On the other side, any restaurant can sign up for an online food delivery service to provide customer traffic and handle the deliveries
This market-disrupting industry has helped many small to medium restaurants and even home-cook chefs that have no physical establishments. The ever-increasing activity in the industry is set to blow up to more than $200 billion in value by 2025. Who can ever resist having your favourite small-shop cake-maker from another city delivered straight to you with just a few taps?
Frost & Sullivan took note of the online food delivery industry’s sudden growth in 2018 as it rose to $82 billion in gross revenue bookings the same year. By the fourth quarter of 2019, it believes the industry will generate more than double — even beyond $200 billion — in revenues.
Even Celebrities Recognise Its Business Value
Many celebrities advertise and endorse online food delivery services. However, celebrities with their own home-cooked services or meal kits heavily utilise the industry’s services. TB12 Performance Meals from Purple Carrot uses online delivery services to transport three meals at different times of day to US subscribers.
Pop superstar Beyonce Knowles’ vegan diet-based 22 Days Nutrition programme, which she developed with trainer Marco Borges, delivers a set of meals once a week to their subscribers on a weekly basis.
Lifestyle icon Martha Stewart, which many know for her home-cooked recipes and meals on her shows, delivers her meal kits using online food delivery services to subscribers on a regular basis too.
However, we’ve only touched the surface — these are just celebrity meal kit deliveries. If we include small restaurants, eateries, and home-cook chefs from everywhere in the world, it definitely shows how busy and prominently active the online food delivery industry is worldwide.
Asia: The Powerhouse of Online Food Deliveries
While America makes up a good percentage of the online food delivery industry globally, Asia accounts for 55% of the global online food delivery market. In China, online food delivery companies noted $34 billion in gross revenue booking in 2018.
In addition, investors’ perspective on online food delivery companies is and still remains overwhelmingly positive. Investment figures from 2018 indicate that over $9.6 billion went to online food delivery companies alone. Many notable Asian companies such as China’s Alibaba and Japan’s SoftBank Group have injected great amounts in numerous online food delivery platforms. These investor actions signify their genuine belief that these industries will grow continuously in the years to come.
Singapore’s tech-oriented populace is another huge contributor to the growing online food delivery industry in Asia. With a gross revenue booking of $342m from January up to June 2019, Singapore is a huge battleground for online food delivery services including HonestBee, GrabFood, Deliveroo, and others.
A Great Problem The Industry Faces
With great power comes great disparity in many areas of the online food delivery industry. A big issue for many establishments and online food delivery users is an imbalance in several areas that potentially cause profit loss for F&B businesses. In addition to this issue, platforms do not provide enough customer information that gives them insight into their business growth.
In turn, F&B businesses fail to create the right logistics to meet the swarming orders coming from their platform. This causes service quality to fail because F&B businesses will prioritise food quality and compromise on other areas outside the food itself. Unfortunately, when customers become unhappy with the service, the online delivery platform will reimburse the customer and deduct from — or in some cases forfeit — the F&B business’ profits.
Fortunately, innovative food delivery and logistics technologies are taking root in the industry. One excellent example is NinjaOS, which grants F&B businesses full independence from online food delivery systems and gives them full information about their customers’ spending behaviours, demographics, and other crucial information that contributes greatly to business and brand growth.
Future Technology That Will Accompany The Industry’s Growth
In 2015, Domino’s Pizza made a small-scale revolution. The pizza brand called on users to make a “pizza profile” on Domino’s then-new online delivery service and link their Twitter accounts to their respective profiles. In turn, Dominos briefed users on Food Emojis and the corresponding items that they can order just by tweeting them. It was a simple and fun promotion, but one that underlines the future of the industry.
It’s possible that appliance integration makes it possible to order and track the delivery. OrderUp is one example: it allows you to order food through your Apple Watch. TVtakeaways is another innovative service built into Samsung’s specialised Smart TV operating system. Feel hungry watching TV? Just open the app on the side of your TV, browse a menu, make an order, and check out.
Perhaps one of the most suspiciously interesting futuristic online delivery technologies existing today is Pizza Hut’s Subconscious Menu. Using Tobi Technology’s eye-tracking innovations, your eye movements will generate recommendations for pizza ingredients.
Ride The Tech Progressive Tides of Food Delivery Today!
Online food delivery industries are booming, and your F&B business is one of its biggest contributors. However, you don’t have to share 30-40% of your profits with established online delivery platforms that don’t give you full insight into your customer’s behaviours and preferences. That’s one of the biggest issues that can bottleneck the industry’s growth if it doesn’t get resolved.
Data is the biggest contributor to an F&B business’ growth. If you have a tool to handle food delivery logistics and gain customer data for market insights without having to share profits, you’d definitely want to use that tool. Fortunately, you have one at hand right now!
If you’d like to know more about it, you can click here to sign up or shoot us an email through sales@ninjaos.com
