Food Delivery Software

If you own or manage a food outlet such as a restaurant, cafe, or food truck, you know that managing food deliveries has its own challenges compared to handling dine-ins or takeaways. On top of managing the kitchen and getting the orders right, you have to ensure that orders are delivered to the right address, within the promised time, and via the most optimized route. 

Juggling all of this manually can be overwhelming. Fortunately, there are tools such as food delivery software to help you out. You can better understand the tool and its features in this buyers guide. 

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What is food delivery software?

• What are the deployment options for food delivery software?

• What are the common features of food delivery software?

What is food delivery software?

Food delivery software is a tool that helps food service businesses such as restaurants, cafes, and food trucks streamline their order delivery processes. 

The tool enables outlets to showcase their menus online and receive orders from websites, apps, social media platforms, etc. It also helps manage the kitchen and delivery agents, ensuring that the right orders are delivered to the right customers. 

Some advanced food delivery software offer features such as inventory management to manage the stock of items and food costing to help set pricing.

What are the deployment options for food delivery software?

Food delivery software is typically available in one of the following two deployment models:

Cloud-based deployment: The vendor is responsible for hosting and managing the tool and users can access it via browsers, mobile apps, or desktop apps. This is ideal for small businesses since it does not require large IT investment and is available on subscriptions typically charged monthly and yearly. 

On-premise deployment: The user is responsible for hosting and managing the tool and the vendor only licenses the software for a one-time payment. Some vendors also provide hosting and customer support for additional charges, however, this requires investment in IT infrastructure and can be a costly affair for small and midsize businesses.  

Key question to ask a vendor: What are the add-on equipment, such as computers, credit card scanners, or display screens, that are needed to use the tool?

What are the common features of food delivery software?

Understanding the common features of food delivery software can be helpful when evaluating different tools. To help you out, we have listed the most common features below:

Online menu: Feature your food menu on websites, apps, or social media platforms via a single back end tool. Add details such as ingredients and images and change the menu as required. 

Presenting an online menu in Thrive POS

Online ordering: Accept orders from multiple online sources such as your website, app, or social media profiles. Also, enter orders manually if required. 

Receiving online orders with LimeTray

Kitchen management: Streamline all incoming orders and send them to the kitchen in a queue for preparation via printed tickets or a display screen. 

Kitchen management in Sapaad

Point of sale (POS): Process payments via a payment gateway, accepting debit and credit cards, digital wallets, and cash.           

Payment gateway created with LimeTray

Delivery routing: Prepare the shortest route for multiple deliveries and direct delivery agents to customer locations.

Planning the shortest route for delivery in Routific

Delivery zone management: Set the area your business caters to. This can be a set locality or radius of a few miles around your location. 

Setting a delivery zone in GloriaFood (Source)

Customer relationship management (CRM): Record contact information and order history of customers to use in marketing campaigns and build repeat business. 

Recording customer info in Sapaad

Reporting: Use collected data to create custom reports on incoming orders, sales, delivery locations, and multiple other metrics. 

Reporting in GOFRUGAL

Key question to ask a vendor: Apart from these common features, what are the differentiating features/functionalities of your software product?

Back to food delivery software directory 

Note: The applications selected in this article are examples to show a feature in context, and are not intended as endorsements or recommendations, obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.