A test of who cooks to deliver at home: often without even having a physical restaurant. From star-rated sushi to dark kitchens that make healthy meals, a state of the art of the business of the future
Food delivery is often talked about, but little is said about the quality of the food that ends up on the plate, the service and the customer experience. But the riders finally get a revenge: if food at home is disappointing it's not their fault. Ordering at home is a science, but it has little to do with that of the IT platform or the chassis. After the cathode-chefs and catering marketers, a new competence arrives: food logistics.
Apps don't cook
The apps and delivery services make it possible for me to be able to dine with a burrito, sushi or pizza from the sofa at home and with the smartphone in hand: they offer restaurateurs a platform to be found, a payment system and even in many cases the rider who picks up and delivers the order to the customer. They can promote a restaurant with discounts and promotions, provide packaging and other logistics services. But on food, as efficient as Deliveroo or Just Eat is, there is no quality control. The most willing customers leave a review, and the market in theory should regulate itself.
Tempus fugit
In a restaurant, a dish waits on the passe a few seconds before being served, but to make us get home it takes minutes, endless minutes, that our dinner spends in thermal bags and on the backs of cyclists who drift traffic. It is easy to imagine that no spaghetti can reach al dente, wave risotto or fried still crunchy. Cooking dishes to eat at home is an art and has little to do with the skill of the cook.
The restaurant of the future has no waiters
From a report by UBS entitled Is The Kitchen Dead? (Is the kitchen dead?), after interviewing over 13 thousand consumers worldwide, it emerged that global food delivery will reach 365 billion dollars by 2030, with a growth of 20% every year compared to the market of 35 billion today. By 2030, according to the report, most of the meals currently cooked at home will be ordered online and delivered to your home. And the specialists will have the better of course. Already today the restaurants that collaborate with Deliveroo increase sales on average by up to 30%. Ignoring the phenomenon is impossible, and restaurateurs should be ready.
Limit freedom of choice?
NASA brought the prawn cocktail into space, so everything is possible. And yet there are dishes that should not be served at home, such as soufflés, pasta, Neapolitan pizza. Even the best version, 10 minutes after being boxed and transported cannot be remotely the same as the original. But pizza is just one of the most ordered dishes at home, although it is much worse than the one eaten in a pizzeria. Customers should know how to choose, but if men always make the best choices for themselves we would live in a much better world. They are restaurateurs having to choose for us.
Knowing how to cook for transport
Traditional restaurants, enticed by the delivery market, should make a selection of their most "transportable" dishes, if not inventing new ones, for use and consumption by home customers. "Eating overcooked pasta" is not a winning strategy, given that a restaurant is a restaurant and would tend to acquire new customers rather than disappoint them; wherever they are. The task of the delivery platforms should be to help them in this choice, because the name is that of the restaurant, but a bad opinion of the service received has a 360 ° impact.
The specialized dark kitchen
The delivery market is in continuous expansion and in recent years many dark kitchens have been created, that is dark kitchens, which work only for customers who order at home. No room, no shop window, only bellhops instead of waiters. And (in theory) dishes designed to be transported. Logistics becomes one of the parameters and one of the competitive grounds in the catering sector. The one who is better at cooking does not win, but the one who is better at making me eat well, after half an hour, at my house. After the catering specialists, delivery specialists are born.
In the gallery, the tested for you by a group of journalists from different newspapers who ordered, ate, paid and commented
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