Steak to your door as high-end food delivery service launches in Leeds
BIG names in the Leeds restaurant scene have signed up to high-end delivery service Deliveroo, which has celebrated its first few weeks in Leeds.
Deliveroo earlier this year raised a £16.1m Series B round led by Accel Partners to fund European expansion and has now launched in Dublin, Paris and Berlin.
The service has branches in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, West Bromwich, Reading, Brighton and Bristol, to name just a few of the 17 existing cities Deliveroo operates in, with Sheffield next on the horizon as a site for the delivery service.
Creating 14 jobs and counting after several weeks in Leeds, Deliveroo has been launched in Leeds by manager Harry Tyndall, who spoke to TheBusinessDesk,com about the challenges of bringing a new business to Leeds.
He said: “We’re not just a bog-standard delivery service. We help market the restaurants who we partner with, and it’s a win-win for them.”
Red’s True Barbecue, Chicago Rib Shack, Cabana, My Thai, Gaucho, and Cattle Grid, to name a few, are already signed up in Leeds centre – so they must be doing something right.
As a gauge of their aggressive expansion plans, last August around 400 orders were coming through a day, solely in London. Now, across their branches, around 4,500 orders are being made every 24 hours, and they track each and every one on an integrated system.
“We are the Big Brother of every order” Harry said. “We know if an order is late, and where the difficulty has arisen. We are really strong on customer service, because if you lose a customer, you lose a restaurant.
“The reason we have a slightly smaller delivery radius than other places is because we want food to arrive fresh, a particular issue with burgers, and burgers are big business for us, with places like Red’s and Cattle Grid signing up” he said.
Driver and Leeds native Gareth popped in to discuss the challenges facing the firm in the city, mainly, (and unsurprisingly) the Leeds roads systems, a seemingly intentional attempt to deceive and befuddle drivers.
Harry and Gareth said: “One of the main challenges in Leeds is the road system. it is genuinely one of the worst I’ve ever seen! No other city we operate in has the same one-way system.
“Shortcuts are non-existent and Leeds is built differently from other cities. Shops and restaurants are mainly in the centre, with a lot of people, students and professionals, out in the suburbs. That’s why we’re extending our reach in the Headingley area as well as around the city centre.
“People are more spread out here, but we have got a lot of corporate interest, especially as Headingley is a fair bit quieter now the students have dispersed, and we have a scheduled order function so that offices can prepare for team or business lunches in advance.”
“It was strategic us setting up in a quieter period, we want to get our drivers trained to the best of their abilities and get a solid team in place to serve Leeds before momentum picks up.
The firm now has five other restaurants, chains as well as independent businesses lined up, and the is it is set to keep growing, though it isn’t all plain sailing for the firm.
“The main issue we have when moving into a new city is hiring drivers.” Harry said. “The drivers are harder to find than restaurants to sign up.”
Thankfully when we get the staff in we have good retention rates, which means we can focus on monetising a partnership with restaurants, and developing it.”
