OPINION: Is Your Tech Platform Serving You Well?
OPINION: Is Your Tech Platform Serving You Well?
With #OrderDirect, the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) has taken the first major initiative to democratise the food delivery marketplace. Technology solution providers however need to address the unresolved issues of multiple integrations and customisation to enable restaurants to retain their brand identity in a crowded marketplace.
THE food delivery business is so diffused – it extends from behemoths such as Domino’s and McDonald’s to hyper-local mom-and-daughter enterprises providing cakes on order – that you do not require a degree in rocket science to figure out that the $5.2 billion (Rs 37,440 crore) market – this is a 2019-20 estimate provided by the Indian Foodservice Delivery Report 2021 – is in need of a full-stack technology that offers an integrated solution to the multiple players.
With #OrderDirect, the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) has taken the first major initiative to democratise the food delivery marketplace. Technology solution providers however need to address the unresolved issues of multiple integrations and customisation to enable restaurants to retain their brand identity in a crowded marketplace.
THE food delivery business is so diffused – it extends from behemoths such as Domino’s and McDonald’s to hyper-local mom-and-daughter enterprises providing cakes on order – that you do not require a degree in rocket science to figure out that the $5.2 billion (Rs 37,440 crore) market – this is a 2019-20 estimate provided by the Indian Foodservice Delivery Report 2021 – is in need of a full-stack technology that offers an integrated solution to the multiple players.
My takeaways from the many conversations I have had with restaurateurs, cloud kitchen operators and home chefs can be compressed into these bullet points:
- Restaurants and cloud kitchens receive delivery/takeaway orders from disparate sources: phone-ins by loyal customers, or WhatsApp messages; walk-ins; their own proprietory websites; the big aggregators; and emerging technology solution providers, which have gathered momentum as a result of the National Restaurant Association of India’s #OrderDirect movement. The challenge is to integrate these multiple orders from multiple sources on one PoS and to transmit them seamlessly to the production end through one Kitchen Display System, which must also have the capability to time each order.
- Food delivery players not only are denied access to customer data (a sore point between the NRAI and the big aggregators who control access to 85 per cent of the business), but also have no automated system to manage their diner database or to record and measure customer feedback.
- Dine-in restaurants, which first navigated the delivery route to keep themselves afloat during the 2020 national lockdown, have realised that they have to keep a delivery
By Sourish Bhattacharya
Published On: 10/08/2021
