What do we eat today?
This post is also available in: French
These last months it’s impossible to ignore them : during lunch and dinner time, there are dozens of delivery boys buzzing around Bangalore to supply meals booked on one of the many new mobile applications such as FreshMenu, Spoonjoy or Dazo. This is a kind of virtual war which occurs right now and we can imagine that only two or three will survive…
There are 2 big trends: companies which cook on their own and deliver the food they have made and those who only display the menus of restaurants in the area (selecting sometimes some meals) then order to the restaurant and manage the delivery.
Key of success are based on food quality, price and delivery time, which is an advantage for applications which just have to deliver from a central kitchen and which don’t have to get the food from a third party restaurant.
This model seems very relevant to us in a city as Bangalore where the traffic can be a nightmare. Also, many people work in “IT Park”, sort of office complexes where the offer for lunch food is very low and sometimes even nonexistant…
These apps are very well marketed, featuring nice pictures of the products (even if at the end, it’s just a meal on a tray) and use geolocalisation, even if reading a map is not something people are used to do in India and the phone call before the delivery is almost mandatory (and often difficult to handle).
Since a little time we have begun to test all these solutions to get an idea more precise about which company does what.
First thing, price is always very affordable. But quality remains very random.
Here are the results of our test :
> Fresh Menu : They have their own menu which change everyday. It’s a bit more expensive than the other ones but the quality is really superior and quantity is huge. But it is almost only non-indian food.
> Dazo. The prices are very affordable, the quantity is ok. They have their own menu plus some other selected options from some restaurant. The food is mainly indian style.
The first order we’e done, the food was coming from a single restaurant and everything was fine (they even managed to reach our place without calling for directions).
But for our last order, we’ve ordered food from different restaurants (thinking they would centralize everything) and all the meals were delivered one after an other. Plus, we had to wait a long time (almost 1h30 for the last one) and the food delivered didn’t look like at all as the one on the app picture for one meal…
> Swiggy : They don’t have their own kitchen and only display the menus of a lot of restaurant. The service is quite fast and efficient. Can be usefull to try restaurants where we dont’ go (cause too far or without a nice atmosphere) or to enjoy a good meal of a restaurant we use to go (they even deliver only dessert or ice creams).
We have also tried Faasos, but the food was very bad and SpoonJoy, the food was good and it was too cold when arriving.
This is only a little preview as we haven’t tried yet Eatlo, TinyOwl, Delyver, FoodPanda, Zomato, Latenight, Justeat, Getmyfood, Nutritown and some more !
We’ll be careful not to fall in the trap and to continue to walk around Bangalore to enjoy nice food ! But we’re curious to see how this new trend will progress, which apps will remain in a year. But these services definitly fill a real need here.
Update June 2016: Fast-forward one year and as expected, this crazy start-up race is already almost over. Dazoo, Spoonjoy are already gone. FoodPanda is struggling, TinyOwl and Zomato delivery teams have been downsized. The only winner for now, from a Bangalore point of view at least (because it depends from one city to an other in India) is Swiggy!