Subject: Newsroom We combined our enegy with the Radio stream in class to bright spark ideas for the first radio show from the TAFE diploma students. The theme – food. Lots of ideas went around the classroom. The next trick was to narrow it down to what went to air and what went to print.
I chose to go with print and wrote this article. The lovely Host of the hour, Karina, gave me a shout out on air and suggested our listeners check out the article.
“Food Delivery Platforms – Do we depend on them too much?”
Story by Kerri Ellis – TAFE Journalism student.
Since Pizza Hut launched the first-ever pizza online order back in 1994, online food delivery has become a billion-dollar business.
The average industry growth from 2015 – 2020 has risen by a whopping 81.1% – an astounding figure. Is this laziness or convenience? These platforms have significantly grown due to time-poor consumers. It’s become a $756M industry with five main platforms in Australia – UberEATS, Door Dash, Menulog, Deliveroo, Easi.
These food delivery platforms allow customers to access restaurant-quality food from local restaurants. This has driven strong growth in this industry over the past five years. While food delivery was once associated with lower-quality food, the rapid growth of these platforms has expanded delivery services to restaurant-quality food.
in 2018, Finder.com.au found Australians were spending an incredible $2.6 billion each year on food and drink delivery through Menulog, UberEATS, and Deliveroo. It’s no surprise that Sydney-siders are the biggest consumers of these platforms. They also said men tend to order more often than women at 3.9 times a month compared females who order approximately 3 times a month.
I ran a survey using Facebook community groups to find out if people use these for convenience or out of laziness. There was a smattering of different answers – some were adamant they would never use a platform, a few said they would prefer to go direct to the restaurant, whereas the strongest reply was they order out of convenience. A couple of people said that their culinary skills were so poor they relied on high quality meals by ordering through these platforms.
One lady said “We use food delivery apps out of necessity. Our youngest child has a disability and, on the nights,, we need to get takeout, I don’t have the time or energy to go through multiple restaurants take out menus, call the restaurant, wait on the phone, place the order and then go and pick it up with the children in tow. It is much more time and energy efficient for me to use an app where a vast range of restaurants and their menus are in the one place and I don’t need to ring the restaurant, wait on hold and then find out it will be an hour before the food is ready and have to repeat the process over and over again to find a restaurant that can feed us fast.” As you can see, it’s not always a practice due to laziness.
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