Learn how Pidge enhanced Food Darzee’s meal delivery operations, reducing costs, and facilitating expansion into new cities.

The Food Darzee Story

To cater to the growing interest in personal nutrition and wellness, Dr Siddhant Bhargava, a personal nutrition expert for celebrities like Alia Bhatt and Sara Ali Khan decided to give wings to his passion project – a way to help thousands of Indians get access to nutrition based, freshly cooked healthy meals.

Food Darzee was founded in 2017 as a food and nutrition company that offers healthy and tasty meals delivered at the customer’s doorstep. Helmed by Dr Siddhant and three other co-founders, Food Darzee has become almost synonymous with home –delivered, goal-oriented nutritional meals.

Starting operations in Mumbai, Food Darzee received nearly 500 daily orders in 2018, which jumped to 2000 across Delhi & Mumbai by 2019, and 3000 daily orders pan India in 2023.

But while their meal subscription business was booming and customers were going crazy over their meal boxes, Siddhant & team were facing a unique set of challenges in delivering their orders timely and efficiently.

What was holding Food Darzee back from growing bigger & faster?

This new-age company was running on old-age systems. Operations were labour-intensive; orders were punched manually, delivery routes were charted out by hand, and rudimentary order tracking was done on WhatsApp. With customers increasing at break-neck speed, Siddhant feared his back-end operations would get seriously overwhelmed if he didn’t identify a technology partner quickly.

#1 High Operational Cost

The payout of every rider is calculated based on the number of kilometers he covers each day. As their former technology partner did not use Google Maps, Siddhant’s team regularly struggled with inaccurate numbers on kilometers travelled, which massively inflated reimbursements.

#2 Difficulty in streamlining daily operations

The sales operations team was spending 6-7 hours every day physically plotting delivery routes. Another challenge was rider management. Were their riders following the correct route? Did they have sufficient orders to maximize their productivity?

#3 Solutions lacked relevance for subscription business

For Food Darzee, 70-80% orders are repetitive. This means sending out the majority of orders to the same delivery addresses. Without the right technology solution, they had to keep making the same routes for the same subscription orders every day without any flexibility for adding new orders in the routes.

#4 Inconsistent Customer Experience

Sometimes customers would refuse orders citing delayed delivery, while the rider would insist that it was delivered in time. Food Darzee had no way to verify these escalations. Such instances impacted the customer’s impression about the brand, as it gave them a less-than-delightful delivery experience.

How did Pidge transform Food Darzee’s meal-subscription deliveries?

Phase 1

Within few months, Pidge changed the whole game for Food Darzee

#1 Improved ROI

By sanitising the latitude/longitude coordinates for every address, Pidge helped Food Darzee reduce the distance travelled by almost 28%! Rider productivity also shot up, idling-time was minimized and Food Darzee was able to maximise orders per rider while keeping the distance, load, and work-breaks in mind.

#2 Tailored Solution for Subscription Businesses

Our feature automatically calculates optimal routes based on orders and available riders. If a rider is absent or their bag is full, remaining orders can be manually reassigned, resulting in a time reduction from 6-7 hours to just 2 hours for route mapping.

#3 Repeat Order feature for subscriptions

For subscription businesses like Food Darzee 70-80% orders are repetitive. To avoid making the same routes every day, they now use the Repeat Order feature on the Pidge platform which allows them flexibility to keep the old routes, add new orders, and even change a customer’s delivery point before the riders start their routes.

#4 Timely deliveries

The team is now able to assign riders within minutes, track deliveries in real time and capture the time-stamp on each delivery to verify claims, and manage refunds more efficiently.

Food Darzee meal subscription customers now get delivery notifications via the Pidge platform. Customers can also send feedback or problems as a reply to those notifications, which has significantly improved customer experience and engagement.

The Pidge Impact, Food Darzee numbers do the talking

Food Darzee is now aggressively aiming at Tier 2 cities to expand its national footprint in the coming few years. With Pidge, Food Darzee gets complete freedom, flexibility, reliability and scalability to support this expansion and go live in new cities soon!