Ever since Elevation Burger started offering delivery on Carriage I’ve been harassing them to let me in on their secret, how are they the only ones on Carriage able to deliver in 30 minutes or less? I’m always super curious about how things work and I really wanted to know how they were doing this. My assumption was that they must have worked out some sort of deal with Carriage where their drivers would just camp outside the Elevation stores waiting for the orders because I couldn’t figure out how else they managed this. I finally sat down with Elevation last week to hear how the backend works and turns out, it’s a bit more complicated than that. So there are two parts to the formula on making the 30 minutes or less delivery happen, one involves Elevation, the other Carriage. So how does it work? If you’re curious read on.
Elevation Burger
From Elevations side, to make the 30-minutes or less delivery time they first needed to be able to get the food prepared as quickly as possible. That involved upgrading their kitchens as well as lots of staff training. This allowed them to bring down the prep time down considerably while remaining consistent. By having a consistent and short prep time, Carriage would be able to send their drivers a lot earlier to pick up the food. The second thing Elevation did was to limit the delivery locations to 30-minute radiuses around their branches. This limited their overall delivery radius around Kuwait, but it allowed them to keep their fast delivery speed.
Carriage
The other side of the equation is Carriage. Because they know exactly how long a meal takes to be prepared at Elevation, they are able to disperse their drivers a lot sooner than they would usually do. Carriage also have an algorithm that can predict based on the time of day where most of the orders will come from. So for example Carriage knows that at 2PM a lot of people in one area order a lot from specific restaurants. So they’d send their drivers ahead of time to that area near those specific restaurants in preparation for the spike they’re expecting. Elevation is one of the brands on Carriage that have a lot of orders so Carriage drivers are usually located near their branches. For example at Seef, drivers tend to hang around the parking lot near Elevation because of the fact that location has a number of restaurants like Prime & Toast, Pizetta and The Burger Hub while also being close to other popular restaurants further down the street like Joa, Gia and Eighty Six.
So in summary, the combination of a consistently fast prep time, a lot of branches and Carriage drivers always being close by is how you end up with a delivery time that’s under 30-minutes. Currently, only Elevation seems to be delivering in under 30-minutes but from what I’ve been told, more restaurants are trying to get in on this as well.
14 replies on “30 Minutes or Less Delivery”
Looks like Carriage is driving the success of this initiative as well. I counted 13 drivers outside of Qortuba EB at 630 PM. Keep in mind the restaurant density in Qortuba is very low and there weren’t many orders coming in. I love the efficiency but in the background I’m worried about the future of small restaurants. Expecting 30 mins delivery is kind of ridiculous if it becomes a mainstream benchmark. Larger restaurants with high margins or restaurants with quite high margins will win.
Why are you worried about small restaurants? Carriage is actually helping small restaurants because they usually wouldn’t be able to afford to set up a delivery system and with Carriage they can start offering delivery overnight.
In general though very few restaurants will be able to offer 30 minutes or less delivery since you would need multiple locations around Kuwait to be able to that. So it will never become a mainstream benchmark since the majority of the restaurants on Carriage have just one or two locations.
I agree that Carriage is helping small restaurants in brand building but I do not see that they helped them financially. Carriage drove a lot of traffic away from the smaller places and they take 30% of the bill from small restaurants – this is significant in the restaurant industry. So, many places are worse off or have adapted by cutting input costs or increasing prices. 30 minute delivery will only become more popular and my guess is that a few restaurants will take the majority of the overall delivery pie. Takeaway I’d like to leave is: Your favorite small restaurant would deeply appreciate you visiting them vs ordering. It will allow them to continue providing the value that led you to fall in love with them in the first place.
I have to disasgree with you here on a couple of points.
Point 1
30% might sound high but thats 30% off an order which wouldn’t have had to begin with if it wasn’t for Carriage. The restaurants also have alternative choices to go with other than Carriage where the cut per order taken is less. But these restaurants are choosing to go with Carriage even though the cut is 30% because of the amount of traffic Carriage sends their way.
So restaurants have the option between:
Less of a cut per order but also less traffic
Higher cut per order but more traffic
Carriage doesn’t have a monopoly, the restaurants are choosing Carriage not being forced to go with them.
Point 2
No place is worse off by going with Carriage. That claim you made is actually ridiculous. If a restaurant is worse off because of Carriage they wouldn’t still be on Carriage they would have left Carriage already.
Cannibalization of your customer base is real when you go on Carriage. You would be better off arguing that cannibalization is ok because you are gaining significant new customers (not always true). It’s like arguing that your website readership will not decrease if you launched a great app.
“Worse off” is not the same as losing. Carriage is changing consumer habits so leaving them isn’t always easy either. My immediate group of friends and family eat out a lot less now Post-Carriage. I’m sure there are more like them.
Carriage is a great, intuitive, customer-friendly platform. What it isn’t is a champion of small businesses with normal to modest margins. Physical patronage is still important if you value what a smallish restaurant can provide.
That’s called competition and that is a good thing. When Dominos first made the 30 mins or free campaign back in the 1979, every other restaurant complained, and government even got involved. Nowadays everybody that delivers food in North America, whether a big chain or a hole in the wall is expected to deliver in 30 mins or less. Competition created higher expectations by the consumers and the end result is better for everyone.
I have seen several locations as well where carriage delivery men just wait and hang around.
I want a drone to deliver my burger straight to my table within 10 mins or less lmao the laziness is strong here!
i see there is a new tracking option from Talabat also now, TalabatGO 🙂 have you heard about it ? anyone tried it?
tried it once and that was it! Carriage is way better in restaurant quality, drivers, tracking and serivce
u forgot to disclose u work for Carriage so your opinion might be biased 😉
it’s a plus but my work doesn’t have to do with my experience as customer 🙂 so I stand with my point haha
I tried Talabat tracking system used on some resturants. It works great and it shows you the movement of your delivery on Google maps in real time. They also send you an SMS when your order leaves the restaurant so you can go to the map. Very helpful.
tried it once in qadsiya and had my burger arriving in 65 min !
never trusted the 30min claim after that