6 Tips for Winter-Ready Delivery Operations

Spare a thought for food delivery drivers as we head into the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere. As most people huddle up by the fire and log on to their favorite delivery app to see what’s hot, these troopers are out delivering more orders than ever. 

The winter spike in orders, especially for hot soup and filling foods, is unsurprising when you consider the popularity of food delivery and the difficulty of moving around in the cold weather – especially in the northernmost parts of Europe and North America.

Aside from the desire for a pick-me-up in the dark and gloomy days of winter, trends also show an increasing number of holiday delivery orders year on year.

For restaurants already dealing with the busy holiday period and often struggling to keep up with delivery orders, how do you cope with this winter spike?

Below we’ll cover the best strategies to cope with excess winter delivery orders, including: 

• Streamlining your menu based on winter trends

• Using data you already have to optimize your menu

• How to use marketing and promotions to manage order timings

• Tips on how to upgrade your delivery tech and improve operations

So if you’re looking to upgrade your winter operations, read on to find out how to make the most of the winter food delivery boom.

How to prepare for the increase in orders

Preparing for the winter delivery spike isn’t just about having the right team and enough ingredients in stock. There are tactics you can use to optimize your menu and operations in real-time to take full advantage.

Owning your delivery data is your key to success, as we’ll discuss further below. It allows you to analyze trends to know your best-selling items, your peak times, and your best customers.

This information can then be used to target the right promotions to the right people at the right times and improve your delivery operations constantly for maximum efficiency, order volume, and customer satisfaction.

Streamline your winter delivery menu based on seasonal trends

A study of ordering habits in the US during freezing temperatures, carried out by GrubHub, showed that orders for hot soups and filling foods like sandwiches get a boost in the winter months. At the same time, unsurprisingly, items described as cold or frozen see a dip in popularity. 

You might be surprised that high volume favorites like pizza slices, mac ‘n’ cheese, and chicken tacos also tend to see a dip. But comfort food is perhaps not considered healthy, and people tend to look for more wholesome options during the cold and flu season.

Analyzing data like this for your local area and streamlining your winter menu accordingly could be the difference between winter blues and delivery success. Focusing on the dishes that are likely to sell better in the colder months could help you reduce prep times while maximizing order volume.

Use your data to further optimize your winter menu

Once you see what works in the real world, you can further optimize your menu to really take advantage of the seasonal trends. Take a look at your past years’ delivery data as well as monitoring orders in real-time to get a clear picture of what is selling best in the cold weather.

Analyzing data from multiple delivery partners can be a pain – logging into the different platforms, navigating different analytics dashboards, and collating all of that data into one format could add hours to your day.

Deliverect takes all your order data from every platform you use and stores it in one format. You can access all the insights from one dashboard on devices your managers are already using.

Having your delivery data at your fingertips will make a huge difference when it comes to analyzing those winter trends and maximizing your menu’s potential.

Spread the word

Winter is a great time to get the most out of your social media presence. People spend more time indoors, lounging on the couch, scrolling through their phones, and dreaming of delicious hot food. 

Share your promotions, new menu items, and beautiful images of enticing dishes to capitalize on your audience’s hunger. A beautiful image of a steaming bowl of hot soup with a caption that speaks to how the viewer is feeling in the cold, for example, could act as a powerful tool to drive them to your ordering app.

Use appropriate hashtags to jump on a winter trend or even create an online movement. A hashtag like #winterfood may be too popular and broad for a restaurant looking to go viral, and something more specific like #soupgoals might gain more traction. 

Sites like Hastagify and RiteTag can help you come up with popular hashtags and see what is trending on Twitter and Instagram.

Use promotions to flatten peak order spikes

Being super busy is great – until your kitchen team can’t handle the volume of orders. Unfortunately, from the restaurant’s point of view, people tend to order food all at once at mealtimes.

Anything you can do to spread out orders into your quieter periods can help you handle more orders overall and avoid delivery delays. Here are some ideas to help you manage the timing of delivery orders:

• Run promotions based on the weather to encourage orders at slower times. For example, people order more for delivery when it’s raining or snowing, so why not try a winter sun promotion to boost orders in better weather?

• Bring happy hour to the people by offering promotions on seasonal drinks for delivery, such as discounted mulled wine or hot toddies at off-peak times.

• Try a breakfast or tea time promotion to encourage food orders away from peak dinner and lunchtime rushes. Can you add a breakfast item to your menu without adding a load of new ingredients to your chef’s prep list? For example, create a breakfast burger menu in addition to your current burger offering just by adding avocado.

Upgrade your delivery tech

As you prepare for the winter boost in orders, it would be a good time to invest in more serious kitchen tech to optimize your delivery operations for the longer term. 

Kitchen display systems can revolutionize the way you organize your production line and the hand-off to drivers. All your cooks can see the orders clearly displayed according to where they’ve come from, where they are in production, and any special requests or allergies.

You might consider investing in more cold storage and dry storage capacity to handle an increase in orders. And make sure you have properly insulated food bags and containers. You don’t want to rely on the delivery drivers’ bags which may be damaged or not up to standard in the cold weather.

Not only will this increase efficiency and allow you to process more orders at peak times, but it will also reduce mistakes, saving you time and money overall.

Optimize your delivery operations

It goes without saying that you want to be getting orders out the door at busy times as quickly, efficiently, and accurately as possible. If one of these factors is missing, the whole operation can fail, and you’ll end up with cold and grumpy customers.

So optimizing your operations should be a priority. When you know your best channels and best-selling dishes, you can ensure your line is prepped appropriately and that your front-of-house team can handle the orders coming in from multiple platforms. 

Deliverect is designed to make your online order process and management as efficient as possible. It takes in all your orders from all the ordering apps and sites you use and collates them into a consistent format. Then it pushes all these orders to your POS system and through to your kitchen. 

Your staff no longer have to waste time manually re-punching orders or worrying about different order formats in the kitchen. They can focus on avoiding errors and providing the best service to your customers.

Get prepared now to avoid a winter delivery disaster

When you’re out in the wilds, it’s no good putting up your shelter when the snow has already fallen on the ground. You need to get ahead of the winter rush to make the most of the potentially hectic winter and holiday season. 

The tips and tools above should provide a solid foundation on which to build your winter success strategy. And they are also designed to help you in the longer term, with digital transformation clearly the future of the restaurant industry. 

If you’d like to find out more about how Deliverect can streamline your delivery operations, through the winter and beyond, book a demo today.