9 Must-Have Features to Scale Your Online Food Business Post-Pandemic

The food industry faced a mixed bag of impact when the pandemic impacted the international economy. While there have been severe losses due to lockdowns from the brick and mortar company, online food supply companies have seen tremendous demand.

With respect to online applications, numerous players, including Uber, DoorDash, Zomato, and others, are on the market. There are many people. Many eateries now want to build online food supply applications because of the increased social distance. In terms of characteristics, however, it always remains uncertain whether or not they are suitable with your scaling demands.

Some challenges faced by online food business during the pandemic

• Meeting customer demands

Today, when you can use your phone to reach various businesses, clients demand a lot when it comes to food delivery. As owner of a restaurant company, meeting such expectations can sometimes be challenging, especially if you have no answer for food delivery.

Simplicity and comfort are the first things that buyers seek. You wish to seek order and pay as straightforward as feasible. Without a solid meal delivery system, you will have difficulty keeping your clients glad, who are used to rapid food flash.

• High Chances of Missing Deliveries

Management of a food supply firm manually involves various dangers and missing deliveries may be the most important one. You have to manage several orders at once while running a food delivery business. Without a solution for food delivery, it is often hard to handle them all manually. This leads to a human mistake which might lead to missing delivery.     

Missing deliveries are a problem that has a bad influence on any company. Lack of time and resources implies loss of food. It might not just lead to clients losing because of bad customer service.

• Poor Order Monitoring

Food supplies are a business with a large number of orders as compared to all other on-demand business services. That's why it is vital, from meal ordering to food delivery, to provide top-quality services.

If you have no effective food delivery system, it is humanly impossible to manage a large number of orders manually without a single error. In addition, it increases the delivery time together with the compromise on food packaging and quality when you manage a bulk order manually. Therefore it is unnecessary to claim that a food supply system is required to start up a food supply firm.

• Tracking

Tracking is an important component of the food supply company. To ensure timely delivery, you should track the food package included by drivers. It offers you an overview of the time needed to deliver meals. Tracking is important. This also helps to keep your clients relaxed because they can see their food package's projected time of arrival. Efficient tracking with the assistance of GPS also helps delivery guys since, with clear route suggestions, they can reach their location.

Here are 9 features that you may create to expand up the company after the pandemic for your online food business application:

1. Smart Search Options

Your users may easily discover their favorite cuisine without navigating through various categories by using a smart search feature. Create an online search bar with filters for sorts of cuisine, type of dishes, or names of restaurants for the internet food business application. Advanced search options can assist to provide a wealthy user experience and make ordering easier. As the best ideas based on the prior order of the customer, you can even add favorite meals or food.

2. Voice Recognition

There are failed efforts at the delivery of goods to a remote place or where you suffer a low-intensity network area. But what if you can give your delivery staff verbal instructions like bread crumbs to follow and assure deliveries on schedule?

Voice Recognition function allows consumers to leave relevant local instructions or to request contactless delivery and even to request a delivery to their neighbor. It's a feature that enhances the user experience and makes it more comfortable. It is the main characteristic that the proprietors of internet food businesses currently use.

3. Contactless Delivery

In commercial operations, the pandemic drove a further development of the new social distance normal in 2021. You can guarantee contactless delivery with medical clearance and government permissions through service providers with a safe technology solution.

The technology stack solution that provides contactless deliveries will also help you track symptoms, contractions, and other medical checks on your drivers or delivery staff. Contactless delivery is becoming a need rather than a supplementary feature.

4. Open Kitchen

Sometimes, when we go to dine in a restaurant, we give special instructions for the food we order, to make it taste more as we want it.  Users can have a real-time view of how their meals are made using a live kitchen function.

Online food companies can include live streaming capabilities for such a feature in their mobile applications. Like a physical restaurant, the open kitchen feature may give a user a great experience. Merge this functionality with an enhanced voice instruction feature to let customers enjoy the whole experience.

5. Systematic Order Management

If you're a multi-supplier food market, order management is an important element of your company. Most online food companies collaborate with various services and even restaurants.

It gets harder to manage orders when you scale. For example, through third-party suppliers, you are a restaurant that offers online sandwiches. A user asks sandwiches for brown bread just to find that brown bread is out of stock. The inventory stocks should thus be integrated with order management for online food companies. You may also develop apps that start the removal by inventory lack of particular meal from the menu.

6. Order History

Similar recommendations you commonly see purchased on a food supply app. These features should include the partners' portals, the online interface of the restaurant managers, and the administrative panel across the platforms. It can assist you in creating special offers and personalizing offers for each client depending on the food they most order.

7. Tracking of Earnings

Revenue tracking is crucial for any online food company. For online food businesses with a central administrator, several mobile app developers provide a complete tech stack for providing revenue analytics.

But as we move forward in 2021, these graphs and insights into revenue tracking need to be more dynamic since revenue per order may rise or drop if you scale higher. The revenue tracking function may help you strategy better for each order placed on your app or site and deliver better outcomes.

8. Feedback and Reviews

Reviews and feedback are a required component of your app and you need to be innovative about them at the same time. Wonders can work here using gaming approaches. It's a way to introduce game-like aspects into your app review and feedback system. In order to promote higher user involvement, you may add discount vouchers to the review. This helps you to learn better about consumer behavior.

9. Hassle-free Payment Options

Modern technology for app development has led online companies to integrate a lot of payment options like payment by debit/credit card, net banking, cash on delivery, and others. However, it is time to move beyond the traditional payment alternatives. With face recognition and fingerprint technology integrations prevalent in any smartphone today, you may offer safe and quick payment alternatives.

To Wrap Up

2021 will be the year of the internet food business with increasing numbers of physical food outlets. So, unique features might help you stand out for clients by saturating internet food business applications. Not only can these features help businesses expand, but they also provide customers a better user experience. Will you be the next leader in food?

Don't allow the epidemic to stop your delivery business from scaling.  We seek to build the finest online food business application integrated with our technological skills. Get in touch with us for an online food business consultation free of charge.

We, Lilac Infotech, are a pioneering food delivery app development company that offers potential for a variety of services to our consumers. Rigorous insights and suggestions will be sent to clients before the start of the project. Our background in designing applications is something that we proudly keep put across. You can also recruit our mobile app developers to help you grow your mobile app