5 Tips To Grow Your Food Delivery Business Online

What is the one thing integral to every Food Delivery business that wants to stay in business? You have to make sure your growth is constant. And how do you do that?

Keeping up with the trends? Yes!

Maintaining the quality of food and services? A big yes!

Also, every business needs that integral skeleton of ethics and has to stay updated with the latest technology, that will ultimately ensure their continuous growth in any industry. This is especially true for a Food Delivery business.

I’ve curated this list of tips and tricks for our entrepreneurs in the Food Delivery Business domain, to ensure a positive growth in their revenues. This blog is a complete-experience & no-theory handbook where you will learn about everything that you can apply in your business.

The 5 Tips to Grow your Food Delivery Business- 

1) Share the Secret Recipe of your Popular Dishes:

To become valuable, you need to give value first. Remember when the Sauce Recipe by Gloria’s Latin American grandmother was in high demand by Hailey’s boss-lady? What was it for? For entrepreneurial reasons, of course.

You should let your customers know about your specials, or some story behind their origin. You can do so by writing a blog with a detailed recipe, by creating a free weekly/monthly e-Book, or promoting it via Youtube videos, or Instagram stories and IGTV.

This will keep all your customers in a loop. It might even lead to building a loyal customer base for you! If they already loved your food, now they’ll feel connected to you on a more personal level.

I know it’s often been considered inappropriate to make things personal when working in a business environment. But when it comes to something as basic as food— you can trust your instincts about what would work with your target customers, and what won’t.

If you don’t happen to have any customer favourites at your restaurant, that you know of, conduct online polls to take your customers’ opinion. You might get surprised by what they have to say about your menu! It’s definitely worth a try.

2) Take Reviews Online:

I remember visiting a cute little local cafe in Ajmer when I was a kid. That was the first time I saw the reviews and suggestions at a food outlet, left by happy customers on- Tissue papers!

Well, times a-changing.

You can still find these reviews at cosy little hangout bakeries every now and then. But that’s not enough. You have to be accustomed to setting up an appealing online presence as well! And it’s really not that difficult.

Try to get as many reviews as possible. You can even offer a 10% discount on the next order for those who do, if they leave good reviews along with some drool-worthy food pictures on social media accounts- yours, and theirs!

Maximize the reach of these posts by using exclusive hashtags for your place/business! This will create an online bubble of happy and incentivised customers. It’s good marketing when you just have to offer a 10% discount on your menu, in return for creating a trending marketing strategy loop. Your customers would effectively become your promoters.

3) Offer Free Food to Foodie Influencers:

Millennial social media influencers can sometimes become a pain in the ass, by being unreasonable, irrational and irritating. They can market a piece of paper and it would sell like crazy! Now ain’t that right?

Well, all of us have our personal opinions when it comes to social media influencers. Can they even be trusted or not? Are they only misleading their followers for fame and money?

Whatever be the statistics of the authenticity of the social media influencers out there, they sure are a blessing to the economy! Afterall, a customer is a customer. Especially when it comes to food business.

You can drive in a lot of first time customers to your food outlet if they see your business being appreciated by their favourite social media influencer or blogger/vlogger. You can invite a famous influencer from your own town, ask them to pay a visit along with their foodie friends, take pictures- of themselves WITH THE FOOD!

Request them to share their happy feedback on their channels. This could be in the form of pictures, videos, blogs, or even live videos or meet-n-greet ups. This way, you will enhance your digital branding. Also, this will give you immediate results.

4) Improve the Food Quality/Services:

I used to go to one of my favourite restaurants on Delhi’s Hudson Lane all the time. I loved their food, ambience, music, crowd and the service- everything!

Until, they hired a horrible waitress. She would just not stop singing at a high pitch. She kept dancing to the music, and kicked the leg of the table where I was seated. Of course, there was no apology. She had her head in the clouds and was totally ignorant of maintaining the professional tone in her attitude. I haven’t been to the place in a long, long time.

If you come across any such feedback related to your food, or the service- make sure that your first step is to pay immediate attention to the issue, and resolving it as soon as you possibly can! Marketing spreads, whether you’re good or bad at your job. If you’re offering amazing lip-smacking food but have a poor quality service, you’re surely gaining bad marketing, even if it’s word-to-mouth.

Apart from maintaining the quality of your food, get your basics correct. Everything has to be in line for you to become a successful entrepreneur and a renowned name in the Food Ordering industry.

Remember the video that went viral on Twitter of a Zomato Delivery guy having food from the deliveries that were yet to be made? To maintain their integrity in the industry, big players of the industry like UberEats, Swiggy and Zomato make sure that they take immediate action when some bad publicity is making its rounds online.

5) Launch with Lesser Quantity, but Good Quality:

Back in my college days, the most popular and crowded stall of our canteen had less than 15 varieties to serve to their clients. But trust me when I say this, it was food to die (Or kill.. No, atleast bunk classes) for. We used to request and recommend a lot of new variants of the same dishes being cooked, but it took the owner 4 years to expand! And I’d love to share the story of this guy, and how he expanded- by introducing a chain of his restaurant, with 4 franchise in the city, in one year!

If your menu consists of 50 items, and only 3 are being bought by people, you need to re-strategize. In the food industry, quality is always supposed to be prioritised in front of quantity.

McDonalds keeps experimenting with new food variants every now and then. It’s a 70 years old franchise food chain, still a reputed name in the industry. Their growth can be accounted to a lot of attributes of their business strategy.

But here’s the most significant one that you can learn from- they remove their under-performing non-selling items and focus on what works well. It’s a fool-proof survival trick!

Basic Principles, Consistent Efforts

You don’t need to recruit any additional team members or freelancers for these tips. For no additional incurred costs, you can get this done by yourself. And I promise, you will get good returns in the next 6 months if you strategise everything well.

Let us know in the comments section, if you liked these tips. You can even let us know if you would like us to add more.