The use of food delivery app is rapidly increasing.
Eighty-six per cent of Americans, according to recent surveys. Another 53% of the population agrees that takeout and delivery are mandatory for their busy schedules.
When only Millennials in the survey are considered, the figure rises to 64 per cent.
According to Statista’s forecasts, internet meal delivery will earn $96.5 billion in sales by 2027, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.9% over the next five years.
Simply put, the app industry for meal delivery has huge profit potential. You’ve found the correct location if you want to construct a food delivery service like Uber Eats or Grubhub or if you want to food delivery app development services for your business.
Read on to find out how we got here, what it cost, and what features were essential to the success of our meal delivery app.
The Easy 6-Step Process for Creating a Food Delivery App
Want to develop your app to help feed the hungry? Just do what we tell you to do in the easy steps below.
Step 1. Confirm the viability of your food delivery app concept.
Doing some market research is the first order of business. While the numbers indicate a potentially massive market, it’s important to note that a small group of companies controls most of the meal delivery market.
As of the first quarter 2022, three companies—DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub—control 97% of the meal delivery business.
Only well-known brands receive at most one per cent of all shipments.
I don’t want to dampen your spirits with these words. However, it would help if you manage your expectations. Competing with established players like DoorDash and Uber Eats in food delivery is challenging.
Thankfully, there is still a lot of money to be made in this area, albeit on a much smaller scale.
Developing a meal delivery app would be smart if you run a restaurant, grocery shop, or convenience store. Food delivery applications are useful for various businesses, including mom-and-pop ice cream parlours.
This is a fantastic strategy for developing your company while satisfying customer needs.
The costs of using a third-party food delivery app to fulfil your orders will be eliminated if you develop your food delivery app.
Step 2: Pick a Strategy for Building Your Food Delivery App
After establishing a demand for a meal delivery app on mobile devices, you can move forward with its creation.
You have the following choices:
- Employ a mobile app designer.
- Create it on your own with a do-it-yourself app maker
- Make use of in-house means for growth
- Hire a software development company to make your app
There needs to be an in-house IT department at most restaurants and supermarkets. That leaves the third possibility immediately eliminated. Hiring a developer or sending your project to an outside agency will save you much money.
In other words, if you’re trying to save money, you shouldn’t go with either.
Only the second option, making it yourself with an app developer, remains. Most people reading this guide right now should consider using an app builder.
It’s a cheap and easy method to make a meal delivery app without learning to code. The simple plug-and-play features offered by platforms like BuildFire make it possible for anyone to create a restaurant app.
Step 3. Decide on a Business Model for Food Delivery
There are numerous methods to make money off of a concept for a food delivery service.
Supply chain management — You launch a business and app to coordinate food delivery services for diners and eateries. These models take a share of each order and charge fees to the restaurants for using the platform.
Facilitator, or Third Party — Like the original prototype, the app acts as a bridge between eateries and their customers. However, a third company handles all of the shipping and delivery. You’re not handling the food; you’re just providing the app as a service.
Direct Food Delivery Apps — Some apps bring food directly from a restaurant or grocery store. The software is managed in-house, and so is order processing.
Featured restaurant fees are a common source of revenue for the first two business models. They can also earn money by charging for delivery or by taking a cut of each sale. Some companies even charge customers a premium subscription fee in exchange for customer loyalty.
The third system requires no further costs beyond the food delivered to each consumer. You can either add a surcharge to the item price or charge a flat rate for delivery.
You can also eliminate the shipping charge by charging a monthly subscription fee. This is a fantastic strategy for fostering brand devotion and boosting repeat business.
Step 4. Select Your Features
Every app for placing a meal order will have the same basic functions. Some of you might find it useful to develop food-delivery software tailored to your specific needs from scratch.
Later on in this tutorial, we’ll go through what makes an app for delivering meals successfully.
But before you get into the development process, you need to have a strong grip on the features you want.
All phases of app creation will revolve around your features. It’s easy to get sidetracked when building an app and include features that sound neat, even if they have nothing to do with your food delivery app’s core functionality.
Maintain focus on why you exist and how you make money. How can we get there, and what capabilities need to be built?
Take the case of a restaurant owner interested in developing a food delivery app. To organize your menu in BuildFire, install the Menu Order System plugin.
Then, you can customize each menu by including your favourite dishes.
Among the most essential aspects of food delivery services is the inclusion of a menu.
Only some things need to be a high priority right now, including social media integration and discussion boards.
First, determine which features are necessary and prioritize those.
Step 5. Making it Real
Most of your time developing a meal delivery app will be spent on this phase.
Depending on the development model you chose in step 2, the final product may look slightly different for each individual.
Using a do-it-yourself app maker will make the design process a breeze.
For instance, if you use BuildFire as a starting point for your project, you can access pre-made restaurant layouts.
Ninety per cent of the design work is already done for you. Then, it would help if you changed the text and buttons to reflect your company’s style.
Plugins providing additional functionality, such as table bookings, can be readily included in your meal delivery business.
Step 6: Advertise and Introduce
The last thing to do is to release your app for delivering food. To reach the widest possible audience, you should release it on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
After that, you only need to promote your app so others can download it. It’s a good idea to incentivize early app use for small businesses like cafes and supermarkets. Someone might give it a shot if you offered them a discount of 20% on their first purchase. It’s a tiny price to attract new customers even if you lose money on each order.
Please get the word out about your food delivery app by promoting it on your website.
Distribute flyers in your place of business. Broadcast emails to your list of subscribers. Using social media to advertise the software.
Promote downloads in any way possible. By spreading the word about it, you can get people excited about downloading your app long before it goes live.
