Plenty of industries have benefited from utilizing data. New processes have been discovered, new products developed, and tons of customer feedback has been collected helping to make businesses more efficient, more profitable, and better able to serve their clients at the same time. It’s nothing short of astonishing what some people have managed to do by tracking seemingly innocuous statistics and turning that into valuable information.
The poster child for this has been the food delivery industry. Once a niche market confined to the big cities, or those servicing people with special needs, food delivery has exploded in the last year. Of course, much of that sudden expansion has been in response to COVID, yet the industry had already been growing and gaining traction before anyone paid attention to the term coronavirus.
The use of big data to improve service in the food delivery world certainly hasn’t been limited to the United States either. That’s one of the great things about the digital revolution, it has made possible the democratization of data and technology in ways that couldn’t have been possible before. That is why we can look at advances made by Food Panda, a food delivery company as far away as Malaysia and the efficiencies they’ve found. They’ve started analyzing, in detail, location and traffic information in real time to allow their drivers to perform better. Not only does this lead to less stress on the part of the drivers trying to make an impossible deadline, but it also makes it possible to give better delivery estimates to their customers. Instead of a generic ‘within the hour’ estimate, they can say with confidence that the delivery will be there in thirty to forty minutes. Their drivers get to their destinations faster, the customers are happier and more of them can be serviced. In fact, each driver is now making as many as three deliveries an hour.
Big data and the digital revolution are driving innovations in other ways as well. Ever heard of a cloud kitchen? This is a recent development in which food is prepared in a kitchen that only serves delivery companies. There will be four or five of these companies that all use one kitchen, delivering fresh food to their customers. There is a good chance this could be the restaurant of the future, at least in crowded areas where space is at a premium.
Sometimes, big data can even help the other way as well. You can actually track UPS drivers through their app and see where they are. If you happen to be in a hard-to-find gated community, you can see where he’s driving around and go meet him at the entrance, saving you both time and hassle. You get what you need faster and he gets to move on to the next delivery. This is especially useful if they are bringing a Blue Apron delivery that you need for dinner that night.
Speaking of UPS, one of the recent data-driven tweaks they made to their process might seem a little counterintuitive. After a thorough analysis of the data, they decided their drivers should only make right hand turns. Why? It turns out that is the most efficient process. The drivers then almost never have to wait on a red light or wait for traffic to clear before making a left turn. Yes, it might take two more turns to get where they are going, but there is less chance they ever have to stop.
Getting back to restaurants, some have used their data analytics to help minimize food waste. Food waste is sadly a thing that happens at restaurants every day. So much gets thrown in the dumpster outback. Some businesses don’t even allow it to be taken home by employees at the end of the day, out of fears that it would encourage people to make ‘extra’ on purpose. Some governments prevent giving it away to the homeless, presumably out of a misguided health concern. In either case, it is in the restaurant’s interest to minimize how much food gets thrown out. Big data has helped them with that in a big way, saving them money and likely keeping food prices down as well.
No doubt data will continue to be a major driver in the food industry, helping to make it more profitable and efficient to better serve its customers. As these companies drill deeper into the data, they’ll find themselves going to you, to the source. TARTLE is driving that movement now, making connections between individuals and companies so that in sharing that source data, everyone’s life can be made just a bit better.
What’s your data worth?
