As a family of 4 with 2 busy boys, one of which plays elite-level soccer 6 days a week, and the other one about to follow in his big brother’s footsteps, sometimes it’s just easier to order in when it comes to dinner time – enter the food delivery apps.
I’m sure many of you can relate to the mad dash that happens after work and school, making dinner and rushing off to kids’ extracurricular activities for the evening.
Don’t get me wrong, my husband and I love to cook; being in the kitchen is our joy, we enjoy our homecooked meals and are always thinking of new dishes to make in the kitchen, but after a long day at work, and the long evening just ahead, sometimes convenience trumps the happy emotion we get from pulling out our cast iron pan.
So with that said, lately, we have been using a couple of things to help us out.
A couple of nights during the month, first, we have been ordering several meals through one of our favourite meal kit services, Chef’s Plate.
For more on our Chef’s Plate adventures, you can watch us put together an entire meal from Chef’s Plate in this fun video…
We discovered this little gem during the Covid Lockdown and it acted as a way for us to enjoy a meal we wouldn’t normally cook but would like to eat – almost like going to a restaurant.
It was a nice change and we have continued to do that despite the fact that here where we are in the Atlantic Bubble, we have been able to resume somewhat normal life with some modifications.
On other nights, to our surprise, we have recently found ourselves using food delivery apps.
Food To Your Doorstep
We are not strangers to using certain restaurant apps to order food for pickup (think Swiss Chalet or even fast food places like A&W who offer lettuce buns – yay for lettuce buns!) but we had never used food delivery apps to have food delivered to our doorstep. I’m not sure why it wasn’t on the radar before Covid, but I guess it’s like many of the changes we’ve made since the pandemic started – we never used to order our groceries online either, but now we do!
Food delivery apps are like ordering food in but they give you the choice of many different restaurants who are not set up personally to offer delivery.
Again, prior to the Covid lockdown, I had never used a food delivery app before but the convenience of ordering food (the selection is wide from participating restaurants in your local area – including fast food) was appealing and very convenient. My kids also liked that we had the choice of these different restaurants and I won’t lie, ordering out gave us a little more energy to get through those long winter days. Yes, I was excited to get that food delivery on our doorstep!
Ordering Using The Food App
Ordering is simple. It’s just a matter of installing the food delivery app on my phone and choosing what I wanted to order.
Since starting to use it, I have since learned, and it’s no surprise that COVID-19 has propelled the industry a few years into the future, as millions of people in lockdown ordered food online for the first time.
With Covid, and people having to spend more time at home social distancing, food delivery apps are a wonderful thing to have. Not only can we safely stay home and still enjoy many of the foods we enjoyed prior to lockdown but we are also supporting our local restaurants which we are happy to do – when the pandemic is done we want to see our local restaurants still there and standing and I’m happy to contribute to them and their businesses while they provide us with the food we crave and love.
The convenience of being able to order in from restaurants that would not traditionally have delivery service but also being able to stay home has been wonderful and I would suggest to anyone who hasn’t tried it, to give it a whirl. Especially in times of Covid, it gives as something a taste of “normal” and what are lives used to be like, and that I believe everyone misses.
So if you’re wondering if using a food delivery app is for you, let’s explore a little further.
What Is A Food Delivery App?
Not to get it confused with meal kit delivery service, where you choose recipes for the week and the ingredients and recipe cards are shipped to your door for you to cook, a food delivery app is used for takeout service/food order where you can order food from your favourite participating restaurants from your smartphone or tablet.
What’s really nice about this is that you can get food delivered to you from places you may not have been able to order from in the past – even fast-food restaurants as well – think McDonalds. Personally, there is a local Greek bakery that we are particularly fond of and it’s lovely to be able to place an order from there and support a family-owned business that has been there for generations etc…)
When ordering from a food service, it is broken up into these parts:
Step #1: Install the food app (whichever you choose to use)
Step #2: Browse the different restaurants that participate in your area. You do this by opening the app, selecting the restaurant you want to order from, browse through the menu to select the food items and quantity, and add them to your cart (see the image below)
Step #3: Place your order – you place an order via the customer app and make payment. You will then get an order confirmation from the restaurant.
Step #4: Now that you’ve ordered, you can now track your order. Customers can track the live order status, check the delivery person’s location, and estimated time of arrival in various apps.
Step #5: This is where the magic happens! All this amazing behind-the-scene stuff happens between the restaurant, the delivery app, pick-up & delivery by the driver and it amazingly appears at your doorstep!)
Step #6: You get your food! And with Covid, food delivery apps have put safeguards in place like contactless payment and delivery to keep everyone safe and healthy as well as adding perks like eliminating fees (check each food delivery app for more information)
Step #7: Review the service (if you choose!)
Popular Food Delivery Apps
If you’re about to jump in and try food delivery apps, here are some of the more popular ones, that you might have heard off:
DoorDash
SkipThe Dishes
UberEats
Below I have included some screenshots for you to take a look at the various apps. You can see that things, depending on the app are broken down into different types of food, allergy-friendly establishments, current specials that the restaurants are running, and more.
You can see from the various screenshots that ordering food is a very easy and simple process.
We certainly have enjoyed using them and they have brought convenience to our lives that sometimes everyone needs, now if you’ll excuse me, all this food is making me hungry but with a looming word deadline and dinner coming up, today looks like a good day to pull out my phone and check what specials are running today on my food app!