Event Coverage

Bringing premium restaurant fare to your home with the Deliveroo app

By Liu Hongzuo - 27 Jan 2016

Bringing premium restaurant fare to your home with Deliveroo

Tristan Torres, GM of Deliveroo Singapore, gave us a personal walkthrough of the app.

Back in November 2015, British startup Deliveroo launched their eponymously named food delivery app in Singapore, joining the ranks of other food apps available here. Now, the app is more accessible to more people residing in Singapore, bringing the convenience of restaurant fare to your doorstep in a few taps on your mobile device.

Deliveroo promised to be different from the rest by being "premium" - bringing food only from popular restaurants and chains, such as Cedele, Chopsuey Cafe, Kinki Restaurant, Meat Liquor, Nandos, Potato Head Folk, and PS. Cafe Petit, in their list of 140 restaurants found in Singapore. It also boasted a delivery time of 32 minutes or less. During their initial launch here, the app only served residences and offices located in the CBD and four other zones – Bukit Timah, Kallang, Katong, and Tanglin.

Now, Deliveroo serves a total of 11 zones - Novena, Queenstown, Ang Mo Kio, Bishan, Serangoon, and Bedok joined the list. They are also aiming to have island-wide coverage by the end of Q1 2016. Their latest update also expanded their list of partner restaurants to 300, including Park Bench Deli, Symmetry, The Butchers Club Burger, and Sushi Burrito. 

Tristan demonstrated how the Deliveroo app works.

In their latest media invite, we hoped to get an understanding of the app’s inner workings, and an experience of both the service and the food quality. If you would like to test it out like how we did, you should attempt their first-timer promotional code: ROOAPP. It gives new Deliveroo users S$15 off their first order.

Both the app and desktop site are equally easy to navigate. You can even make orders well ahead of time without incurring further charges.

The ordering interface is easy to use. If you’re familiar with Uber and Grabtaxi, Deliveroo is similar in process and layout. You can roll around the map (or key in an exact address) to indicate where your food should be delivered. Once done, it will lead you to a list of available restaurants that can deliver within 30 minutes of the marked area.

Choosing the restaurant and the delivery time will bring you to the eatery’s menu. Tapping an item would immediately add the item to cart. You can only add dishes from the same restaurant within one order, so if you have cravings from different establishments, you’ll have to make multiple requests for each eatery. Meanwhile, Deliveroo is trying to work with restaurants to allow pickups from multiple food joints in one order.

Tapping "View Basket" at the bottom will bring you the Basket summary that details your selection, and the fee required (all delivery orders worth below S$25 will have a charge of S$5, but that goes down to just S$3 if you exceed it).

In the demo, Tristan ordered food from from Kinki, Capricci, Two Blur Guys, The Butchers Club, PS Café, and Meat Smith.

Tapping "checkout" will bring you to the payment page, where you can pay with a working credit or debit card, as well as a PayPal account. You’ll need to enter your exact delivery address as the initial map interface is for finding restaurants near you. You can also store up to 25 addresses on your account (if you choose to create one with the app).

One interesting feature Deliveroo has is the ability to track the location of the delivery person through the app itself - just like GrabTaxi and Uber tracking your assigned driver's whereabouts. Existing apps like Foodpanda only notifies the user if the food is “on the way”, but you’re required to call the Foodpanda hotline if you want a more precise location and delivery time. Deliveroo is hoping to expand their rider pool up to 600 by June 2016. As you can tell, Deliveroo is really serious on scaling up and meeting growing demand.

Tristan explaining the type of delivery bags used for Deliveroo's orders.

When the food arrives, the user is expected to press the confirmation button on the rider's Deliveroo app. This is to help ensure the user confirms the requested order is delivered intact and helps to officially complete the trip made by the rider, even when the riders actually tally the orders at the restaurants before collection. Our Kinki example took exactly 30 minutes to arrive - we completed the order at 7.35PM and the food arrived at 8.05PM. The media demo had food delivered from Capricci, Two Blur Guys, The Butchers Club, PS Café, and Meat Smith.

For those wondering if you will be paying a premium over dining at the actual restaurants, we're glad to mention that the cost of food is similar or identical to the price you would pay when eating at these restaurants. The prices reflected on the Deliveroo app is the same as the in-house menu prices, but with GST factored into the displayed amount. Of course, if you would like to give a little token for the hardworking riders, you can choose to tip them, but that has to be done via the app.

Portobello burger from Two Blur Guys. As you can see, the food is well presented, which is quite unexpected for delivery based dining.

Sushi from Kinki Restaurant at Fullerton Bay Hotel came in Deliveroo's packaging created collaboratively with the eatery - these are unique only to Deliveroo (and delivery for premium restaurants are already rare).

1kg T-Bone steak from Meat Smith demonstrates Deliveroo's ability to accept larger orders.

Dinner conversation with Deliveroo also revealed many upcoming projects and plans for expansion. 5th February 2016 will see the app including zones such as Tampines and Changi Business Park. March will see an experimental trial for breakfast orders in the Central Business District. Deliveroo is also allowed to deliver alcohol products from restaurants, and they are currently working on acquiring Halal certification for delivering Halal-certified food.

 

I'm a golden ticket winner!! #doubleconfirm #deliveroosg

A photo posted by Hossan Leong (@hossanleong) on

Deliveroo will also be conducting a CNY promotion from 22nd January 2016 to 7th Feburary 2016. Customers who use the app will stand a chance of receiving a Golden Ang Bao. The Golden Ang Bao will be deposited into a random delivery order that will come with their delivery Roo Man / Roo Woman. Each Golden Ang Bao is worth S$88 in cash, limited to only 88 winners. Media personality and events host Hossan Leong is one of the winners for this campaign thus far - Deliveroo said that he was randomly chosen.

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