Have you considered offering a delivery or takeaway service instead of just a table service, but aren’t sure where to start? We’ll share some tips on how you can attract new customers, as well as loyal ones, looking to treat themselves when they fancy a night in!
Below are a few tips on how to equip your business to also be a takeaway and delivery restaurant:
Where is your restaurant? Are you in a residential area, or maybe surrounded by office blocks, or perhaps next to a university?
Customers will travel to a restaurant, but a takeaway service and delivery option will be most attractive to those within a 3-mile radius of you. Identify this audience and introduce them to your services using physical signage and flyers, email marketing, or redesigning your website homepage. You can even let your loyal dine-in customers know through social media.
Keep it simple! Concentrate on low-cost, high-profit, easy-to-prepare dishes.
Study your menu and find items that use the same ingredients or preparation so you can save on inventory costs and cooking times. This is particularly important if you are experiencing staff shortages, or are operating in peak times.
Do you have space for customers to come in and order a takeaway without crowding your dining room?
If you have limited space, enable your customers to order and pay before collection using a service partner like UberEats or Doordash. Also, it's essential to provide a dedicated space to accommodate the additional prep in your commercial kitchen, packing up orders and for collection by customers and your delivery team.
Managing a takeaway service and deliveries alongside your regular food service can be stressful, so you should introduce ways to reduce complications and simplify things for your team.
The RATIONAL iCombi Pro and iVario Pro intelligent cooking systems can cover more than 90% of all your conventional cooking applications with the same simple operating system. Recreate authentic Indian dishes like Tandoor Chicken in the iCombi , whilst preparing traditional curry sauces and dahls in the iVario , with the added bonus of being able to hot-hold items for service.
Both pieces of equipment were designed with large-quantity cooking in mind and can deliver the same great results over and over. There is no need to supervise the cooking process, leaving your team to concentrate their efforts on different areas.
Good packaging for takeaway and delivery will directly contribute to customer experience and satisfaction.
If customers receive cold or soggy food, items mixed up, or not easy to eat from, they will likely not order from you again. Try and find sustainable, eco-friendly, sturdy, well-insulated or ventilated options to retain your food's quality.
Takeaway and food delivery restaurant sales are driven by your customers, so ensure you provide what they want. Think creatively, listen to your customers, spread the word and make it easier on yourself by introducing time and space-saving equipment. The team at RATIONAL can help redesign your kitchen space and discuss which multifunctional cooking systems you can introduce to help with the additional workload. Get in touch with the team today.