The food delivery apps are booming in the USA and total user-base is expected to hit 60 million by 2023. Last year, there more around 38 million food app users only in the country. Such a stark rise in food delivery application users speaks volumes of its market and probable future.
Businesses are heavily investing in a robust food delivery system enabling users to order their favorite food from their neighborhood. Hiring a good food delivery app developer to ensure businesses of efficient delivery root planning system integrated into an app.
It helps deliverers to add value by optimizing the deliveries. And more such optimization is knocking doors in 2020 as food delivery business owners looking to leverage technology.
Here are the four exciting trends in food app to look out of in this year:
The scenario of delivery personnel transporting food packages on a motorcycle will soon change. Many of the food delivery and ordering apps are experimenting with alternate ways to deliver the containers that minimize the kitchen to door time. Zomato, Uber Eats, and Domino’s have tried incorporating drone delivery mechanism to bring down the delivery time by half.
These chains are waiting for the government nod to start delivering through drones and overcome the last mile delivery challenges faced by food delivery partners in the USA.
Also, there are food delivery robots equipped in some places like San
Francisco and some more university campuses.
These robots are unlike some caricatures from a sci-fi film since they are designed for a specific purpose of food delivery. They may also change the way how developers create food delivery applications since delivery robots are anti-theft.
The mechanism deployed in the robot to avoid robbers from stealing is that the power to unlock robot is only with the intended users. Those who have ordered food using their app can unlock robot from that application itself to ensure security.
Virtual or cloud kitchen are the ones that are exclusively operating for app orders. UberEats runs have come up with the concept of virtual kitchen which only lists meals and eateries available on its platform.
It is a great initiative that cuts down the need for ballooning operational costs of owning and running a vast physical space. It provides convenience to partnering restaurants, allowing them to only use their kitchen space for preparing meals that can cater to user demands from an app.
For instance, Uber Eats enables a sandwich eatery to provide exclusive salads for its user on the app while a physical store can still offer only sandwiches. Such an eatery is virtually a salad and sandwich bar while being the latter at its brick and mortar location. This cafe could become a virtual sandwich cafe in the Uber Eats app while staying a salad cafe at their physical place.
The year 2020 is expected to transform restaurants into such virtual kitchens creating a win-win situation for the business owners and delivery app owners. This way, food delivery apps can channelize their efforts on product development and data analysis while saving a lot. And users too can benefit from having more options to choose from at reduced rates.
This year will see food delivery services using big data for their last-mile delivery software and try running a business efficiently. Most of these food app owners collect the following data to analyze the scope of delivery.
Collecting such layered information will help food delivery businesses to come up with accurate delivery time, monitor customers’ loyalty and satisfaction, reaction to complain, food offer personalization and much more.
Consider how Grubhub analyzes millions of orders to offer the most appropriate custom meal recommendations. On the other hand, Doordash leverage big data for inventory management to estimate the number of couriers that would suffice in a given day, public demand of any specific cuisine and also the preparation time.
Big data in food delivery business is expected to redefine 2020 by transforming the way how such food delivery systems worked till now.
The access to technology from multiple devices is a norm with new smart gadgets being rolled out in the market almost every month. Every such gadget comes up with more intuitive features with each release. Now, the TV, watch and speakers can get easily connected to Wi-Fi. Synching such smart devices with food delivery application is set to revolutionize 2020.
Now users can order food from any of their smart devices apart from tablets and smartphones. It won’t come up as a surprise if food businesses design dedicated for such a device to open more ways for users to engage with the brand and order food.
In India, small restaurant owners are using WhatsApp food ordering service as an on-demand food delivery application where a user orders over WhatsApp and share their location. The rider will share the location once the food is out for delivery for real-time tracking.
So, this year will see more such modern devices capable of ordering food as the market gets more competitive. Everyone is looking to get their food to deliver faster and cheaper without compromising customer experience. It is only a matter of time in 2020 when more such options open up and users seek experiential order placement that challenges the conventional order system.
The constant progress in technology and available for more resources will enable solving many challenges faced by food delivering companies in 2020. Integrating better features in food delivery application will help businesses surpass their targeted growth and move ahead of the competition quickly.