Only 15 to 18 percent of restaurants today offer delivery, declared Alex Canter at the Food On Demand Conference, “which is a huge mismatch compared to 80 percent who are getting delivery. So if you’re not listed on any one of these platforms you don’t exist.”
Canter encourages other restaurant owners to just do it, meaning get into delivery, and believes they can overcome the pain of getting there. “When we first started out with delivery we were doing 20 orders a day and that started building. Now we’re doing 250 online orders a day,” he said. “When we were first thinking about the profitability, we realized there were a lot of fixed costs in our business: the lights, the kitchen staff …the rent. Adding more order volume for us was incremental until we had to add another human. To me it’s a good problem to have when you have to hire a person” to handle all the delivery volume.
Tomlinson seconded his point. “You have to deliver. Even in a chef-driven restaurant, we’ve had to jump over that hurdle and figure out how to do it. If you’re not doing it now, you have to.”