Currently, the online food delivery industry has immense potential. People have become comfortable with the idea of ordering food at home instead of going to stores, restaurants, and cafés. People are enjoying rapid food delivery services and taking full advantage of it. One of the common questions asked is ‘How do I Build a Food Delivery App.’ So, let’s dig deep into the process of developing a restaurant mobile application, similar to that of UberEats.

There are a number of effective ways to develop a food delivery app. One of the ways is using the existing APIs that fastens the food delivery app development and, at the same time, reduces the cost. Known APIs provide the much-needed building blocks to create your own delivery app.

All those mobile apps developers are required to do is to assemble the blocks that build a functioning app. Optimizing the app takes added time and cost.

How Does a Mobile App for a Restaurant Work?

• The platform charges a fixed sum of money from the owners to list their restaurants on it.

• The customers get a chance to browse through and order food online using the app.

• Once the customer places an order, the restaurant receives a notification. The online food ordering system gives the restaurants an option to either accept or reject the order.

• A notification is sent by the system to a delivery person, notifying them about the order. The delivery person can either accept or reject it.

• If the delivery person accepts the order, the customers can track the order by using the app.

Revenue Model of an Online Food Delivery App

Three revenue models that are commonly used:

1. Subscriptions

Generally, the platform charges a fixed sum of money from the restaurant owners to list their restaurant on that platform.

2. Advertisements

If the online food delivery app is gaining traction and increasing its user base, it can start earning through advertisements. Various restaurants or brands can get a space to list their banner on the platform. These listings are known as premium listings. Depending on the size and duration of the banner, the charges are fixed.

3. Commission

On every order, the platform has its cut that it takes from the restaurant. The commission ranges between 10-20% of the order value.

A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Build a Food Delivery App

Step 1. Look out for the hot trends in the food delivery industry.

To be one step ahead of the competitors, you need to know the latest trends in the industry.

Step 2. Food Delivery Model

There are multiple food delivery model options available. You need to choose one, keeping in mind the model that will work best for your business. In the food delivery market, the two main models available are:

• Order-Only Model: In this case, the companies are responsible for ordering and managing the orders. The platforms charge a commission of 10-20% of the order value. This model helps in avoiding the hassle of restaurants managing the cooking and delivering.

• Order and Delivery Model: In this case, the companies are responsible for managing the orders and delivering them. Many businesses use this model tie-up with courier services to deliver the orders. A commission of 10-20% of the order value gets charged from the restaurants and a delivery fee. The delivery fee can get charged based on the distance between the restaurant and the final delivery destination.

Step 3. Research of the Target Market

To develop a unique food delivery app, it is essential to know and understand the target audience. Once the businesses realize who will use their service, it solves 50% of the problem and helps to meet the target audience’s needs faster.

The Cost

The app development cost with companies like SDI ranges anywhere between $6,000 to $12,000. You shouldn’t wait too long to create your restaurant delivery services as a food delivery business is gaining popularity. It takes on average 2 to 4 weeks to develop this kind of app but keep in mind that it does fluctuate based on the number of features you choose to have.

Once you have all the primary steps completed, SDI can help you determine the technology stack that will be used for developing your food delivery app. Tech stacks also include the payment gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, Square API, etc. If you are on the verge of building a food delivery app, then make sure to connect with us at team@sdi.la or call us at 408.621.8481.

Every once and a while, we like to cast a spotlight on new apps that have really impressed us. Sometimes, they’re apps for millennials, like SnapChat; other times, we like to talk about apps that can help solve world crises. But today, we want to talk about a new app revolutionizing an industry – the world of Auditions and Castings.

Now, full disclosure, SDI is the development team behind this project. But this is important: we were but a vessel for the app owners. They came to us with a full-fledged plan, a concept, and even plans for future growth (which we can’t disclose at this time). All we did was tell provide them with the tools to accomplish their dream.

App Revolution

The Castivate team comes from the world of Performance and Acting, so they had an intimate knowledge of the industry. This is the secret to the success of any entrepreneurial venture; we’ve worked on literally thousands of tech projects, providing us with unique insight into this world. When it comes to starting up a new tech tool or service in an existing industry, the most successful businesses are those started by insiders.

Castivate is no different (available for free on both iOS and Android) . For decades, performers have struggled to find the right castings, to get audition opportunities that not only match their skills but are nearby. But Castivate also approached this problem from the perspective of the casting director; a persistent issue with casting directors, especially in the world of acting, is getting talent that actually matches the role they need to fill.

So, Castivate was designed to solve this issue. It sends castings for performers (Dancers, Stage/Film Actors, Singers, and even Models) directly to a User’s phone. Sure, there are other digital options that connect performers to castings calls; mostly in the form of websites, many of them only focus on one performance arena, or one location.

Castivate, on the other hand, searches the internet for all of the performance arenas listed above, pooling it all in one single location. However, the team wanted it to be more than just a list of aggregated auditions. They had strict requirements, the first of which was an expiration date. They wanted old castings for past auditions to be removed from the list, automatically. Other requirements included a robust location feature, where castings would get sent to a user based on their geolocation.

This ensured that performers only got castings calls for local auditions (though users can select to receive all castings!). This feature means that actors, dancers, singers, and models get castings that are actually local to them, instead of combing through a bunch of castings for people clear across the country.

But this is the age of true customization. An era where tech allows us to create apps that rival the intelligence of toddlers (and potentially some adults). So our developers also utilized machine learning and a robust filter to go a step further. When users sign up for castivate, they have the option to set up a personal profile. This profile covers:

♦ Skill set

○ Actor, Singer, Dancer, Model – or all of the above;

♦ Age;

♦ Gender; and

♦ Ethnicity;

When combined with Machine Learning algorithms, Castivate takes this information and compares it to thousands of castings on the internet. Every day, the app selects the most relevant casting and sends it right to their phone. No endless searching for the right casting, no time wasted on auditions that are looking for someone else entirely. Just set up your profile once, and get fresh castings daily without doing anything else.

For Casting Directors, Castivate helps them find the specific talent the role needs. While Castivate doesn’t need to direct input to host auditions, directors can post on the app manually, thereby expanding the potential talent pool. Finally, we want to talk about one last awesome feature that helps both talent and directors: Castivate allows users to upload their headshots and Contact details right onto the app.

Directors can look through thousands of headshots hosted on the app, quickly tapping (or, in the case of the website, clicking) on photos to dive into the details. Even if a director doesn’t directly view the archived photos, we automatically populate headshots between casting calls, dramatically increasing the exposure of our hosted talent. Pretty awesome, right?

At the end of the day, we have an obvious stake in the success of this app. But that being said, we wrote about this because it is a prime example of entrepreneurial ingenuity. This idea would never have occurred to us, but the Castivate team didn’t have the skillset to build the app framework itself. Only when we came together did we build one of the best apps of 2017, in a field that is in dire need of technological innovation.

So, got an idea, but need some tech guidance? Give us a call at 408.805.0495/408.621.8481 – or click to contact us! Oh, and if you’re interested in Castivate, reach out to their team here, or download the app on iOS or Android. It is 100% free – no hidden costs, no signup fees or “platinum” user accounts. Just an amazing, life changing app, for free.

We are recognized as a top California Mobile App Development Company on DesignRush

World hunger is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the want or scarcity of food in a country.” Around the world, roughly 795 million people suffer from chronic undernourishment (constant food scarcity. That’s about 11% of the global population. Out of that 795 million people, 780 live in developing nations and regions.

In 2011, it is estimated that 45% of all child deaths were direct result of malnutrition and food scarcity. In developing nations, it is estimated that 50% of pregnant women, along with nearly as many children under 5 were anemic (iron deficiency is a common side effect of malnutrition). Worse, anemia is kills 1 in 5 pregnant women (see all resources here).

This doesn’t need to be the case. We’ve been doing a good job since 1990, when global hunger was nearly twice what is today, but we’re still not doing great. The sad fact about this whole situation is that there is currently enough food produced annually to feed every person in the world the daily requirement.

The biggest impediment to achieving elimination of World Hunger is poverty. Simply put, much of the world’s poorest people do not have the capital to purchase enough food, nor the land or supplies to create their own food. So the key to solving the world’s hunger crisis is either lowering the cost of food or raising the purchasing power of the lower classes (or both).

As a development company, we’re obviously tech evangelists; that is we believe in the ability of technology to solve any number of problems, from improving health systems to alleviating world hunger. But we’re also used to approaching things from the perspective of the entrepreneur. In other words, the world comes down to problems, and solutions.

The problem is that over a 10th of our world is starving. The problem is that every year, an entire third of all food produced gets wasted. That’s 1.3 billion metric tonnes of fully edible food, just tossed into the garbage. This wastage affects everything, including leading to a third of the planet’s arable land basically producing garbage.

The solution is modern technologies innovatively applied to solve the problem. Software coding, combined with the world wide web has disrupted old systems across the board. These same technologies can be applied to food waste. An excellent example of a business-side solution that is mutually beneficial to all stakeholders is Chowberry.

Chowberry, The Mobile App that’s Trying to Save the World

Chowberry is a two part solution involving both a website and (more prominently) a mobile app. Both involve selling food that is close expiring. Essentially, a partner retailer downloads the retail Chowberry app; the app uses information pulled from barcode scanners to let retailers know when the food is close to expiring. This information gets fed both into a mobile interface for the retailers, and the Chowberry website.

The Chowberry app will send a notification directly to the retailer when a product is close to expiring. The retailer can then either offer the food at a discount to low-income people, or go directly to a third party that specializes in such products.

The website takes the same information and offers it directly to the consumer. A consumer searches for food, sees the options locally, and selects the desired product. Chowberry then notifies the retailer, who sets the item aside for the consumer to come pick up.

Oscar Ekponimo, the software developer behind Chowberry, grew up knowing hunger. Mr. Ekponimo took what is a relatively simple and standard eCommerce solution and applied it to a situation he knew intimately. The result was an innovative solution that with just a pilot program, it helped 150 children in need. While this is just a small chunk of the problem, Chowberry demonstrates the power of apps, websites, and software to change the world.

The biggest downside to Chowberry is that it’s currently only available in Nigeria. But the genius behind this idea is that it’s attractive to literally all stakeholders. Look – Food waste and loss represent nearly a trillion dollars (US). That’s a trillion bucks that we’re basically lighting on fire. So food loss can not only be framed as a humanitarian issue, but also as a strictly economic issue.

For retailers, solutions like Chowberry mean that food once represented a financial loss can be turned into a profit (one that makes you feel good too). For Consumers, it means more food, for a lower cost. For Chowberry, it means making a living and giving back at the same time. A win-win situation!

The solution doesn’t have to be limited to a retail solution though. Machine learning can be used to optimize transportation methods or routes and AI can be used to predict what crops should be grown when and where. Heck, we can even write code that can help predict what areas may encounter an emergency food shortage (i.e. tracking weather to better anticipate severe events).

The point here is that Tech doesn’t have to be just about making a profit. Technology gives people tools to change the world in new and exceptionally effective ways. Got an idea? Give us a call at 408.805.0495/408.621.8481 (or click to contact us).