How To Start A New Food Delivery Business: A Step-By-Step Guide – [2022]
Food delivery services have become increasingly popular in recent times. Many restaurants and takeout establishments are registering on marketplaces online for ordering options, which allow customers to place orders from their computers or mobile devices. In addition, many of these businesses also offer food delivery services.
The reason why online ordering and delivery are so much popular these days is due to the pandemic situation of spreading the virus. Everyone trying to use the service where fewer humans involve as much as possible. This makes them and others safe from the spreading virus.
Such a contactless era gives birth to many food delivery businesses and make a food delivery business in trend for the last couple of years.
A food delivery business is a marketplace platform where you register multiple restaurants to put their food menu for customers to select and place orders. it is not limited to just food delivery, customers place orders for takeaway also.
Following milestones involved in How to start a new food delivery business in 2022:
- Select your business model & do business planning first for food delivery services.
- Get your assets ready for the food delivery business.
- Ready for testing your business model with trial restaurants.
- Ful-fledged opening of your business.
- Scale and market your business and grow gradually with it.
Step 1: Select your business model & do business planning first for food delivery services.
Find your unique selling point which makes you different from competitors. Most popular online food delivery marketplace platform these days charging premium from the restaurants and taking advantage of the current corona time. Here you can offer your services for less percentage on each order or simply charge fixed monthly subscriptions from restaurants.
Select your business model, Either charge a fixed percentage on each order from the restaurants or charge a monthly subscription fee from the restaurant that you need to decide. Makes different promotion plans for your restaurants.
Plan your geographical area: this is important to decide in a launching phase how far you can cover with current resources. You should start with a comfortable area and increase it gradually with more tie-up with restaurant and delivery staff.
Plan your financials: Make a budget for how much you will spend on initial technology requirements and on initial marketing to get restaurants registered on your platform and advertise your business among end customers and driver users. Project your revenues in the coming initial months along with the investment inflow required in the initial months.
Step 2: Get your assets ready for the food delivery business.
Tech Solutions: Right tech solution for running your business is a key to its success. The online food delivery marketplace business is a technology-driven business you need many different applications to make it work. You need the following tech solutions for an initial launch:
- Online Marketplace Food Delivery Website.
- Backend control panel for your Restaurant Owners.
- Backend control panel for Super Admin as a platform owner.
- Delivery management web console.
- Customer Food Delivery Mobile Apps.
- Ordermanagement Restaurant Admin Apps.
- Apps for your delivery drivers.
This makes a complete Online food delivery marketplace solution.
Now the question arises of how you would get these solutions. There are two ways for that, it all depends on your budget & timeline of launch. If you have ample budget and enough time to get this developed custom for you then you should contact some food delivery marketplace solution development company. In this way, you have to shell out around $15000 – $20000 of money and need to wait for 4 – 5 months for complete development.
The second way is smarter where you launch with fewer funds and a quick turnaround to test your market quickly. It’s a get a white label food delivery marketplace solution from the agency and launch it in a couple of weeks’ time to test your market. This solution only costs you between $999 – $2500 only.
Stationary & Branding: Now get attention to your business branding, get finalize your business logo and colors first. This is very crucial to make or break the business. Pay special attention to the chosen colors for your new business. It should be related to food like shades of red, black, brown or white and red.
After getting your business log to get your packaging material ready with your branding. Packaging also acts as branding and marketing material to your end customers.
Make posters to be placed at prominent places with QR codes so that new customers can download your apps to know more about your delivery services and start placing the orders.
Ready your all social media branding, because in today’s time it’s so easy to drive traffic from social media websites rather than print media advertising.
Start sending emails to nearby restaurants to ask for registration on your platform for free, at least 50 restaurant registers are considered optimum in the initial launch of the food delivery marketplace platform.
Step 3: Ready for testing your business model with trial restaurants.
Try to run the full process of the food delivery marketplace business among a closed group of users like limited restaurants, few delivery boys, and few customers. This will give you the opportunity to find out if there are any glitches in the services. Fix them and take feedback from everyone. If you can accommodate those changes make them in the process.
Important Points to check in this trial run:
- How long restaurant takes to accept orders and in preparation till the time drivers come to pick up the orders.
- How long nearest available driver takes to accept the order delivery and get to a restaurant for pickup and delivery to the end customer address.
- How safely the driver delivers the orders to the customer with the contactless protocol.
- All order status notifications are working properly with customers, restaurants, and drivers.
- Set properly branded content in all notifications, contact, or help pages of the marketplace platform.
Step 4: Ful-fledged opening of your business.
Now you are all set for the launch day of your business, make a buzz on social media with gimmick posts like some offers of the launch, etc… so that posts spread organically on the social platforms.
Make some special offers for the launch and spread it all over the social media profiles like Facebook, Facebook groups, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn groups, etc.
Step 5: Scale and market your business and grow gradually with it.
When things keep rolling and going good do not stop, start finding out more avenues and tie-ups to scale your operations. Arrange investors, start services in new areas, etc.
