Top Seven Analytics Insights You Need to Boost Restaurant Delivery

Food delivery is becoming a major source of revenue for restaurants all over the world. In the UAE only, the food delivery market size was worth $651 Million in 2023, and it’s expected to reach $1,625 Million by 2032. This accelerated growth is driven by key factors like convenience, the technological advancements in the F&B sector, or a growing expat population in the UAE. While there are many advantages that restaurant managers can reap off from delivery-driven revenue, there is also a havoc of challenges. This blog is for restaurant owners and managers who want to make the most of delivery by using the right analytics insights to their advantage.

Peak delivery times

Peak delivery times refer to the busiest hours for restaurant delivery orders. During these times, your team handles a high volume of tasks – taking orders, preparing meals, packaging, and getting them to customers quickly. Generally, peak times fall during lunch (11:30 – 14:00) and dinner (17:30 – 21:00), though this can vary based on the type of restaurant you run. For example, a pizza restaurant may see different peak times than a dessert business, as customer demand can shift depending on what you offer.

Why is it important? Restaurant operations optimization

Knowing your F&B business’ peak delivery times is important for several reasons. 

• Optimize staffing: Understanding your busiest times allows you to schedule more staff during peak hours, ensuring smooth operations and timely service.
• Efficient restaurant inventory management: By preparing your inventory in advance for peak periods, you can avoid running out of key ingredients and ensure all menu items are available to meet customer demand.
• Improve customer satisfaction: Meeting customer expectations during high-demand times builds trust and loyalty, as clients can rely on your restaurant to deliver their favorite items without delays or shortages.

How Polaris ERP Helps?

Using Polaris ERP restaurant software you can easily identify your busiest times for delivery for each day of the week. This will allow you to see patterns across the full week, and schedule shifts for your staff to match the work level required each day of the week. 

Furthermore, sales are directly connected with inventory and restaurant data insights and analytics inside the Polaris ERP environment. This allows you to see what are the most frequently ordered items, so that you can ensure your inventory is properly stocked with the needed ingredients. 

Top performing delivery platforms

Which platforms performed best during a specific period? How did those results compare to previous periods? What factors drove these performances? These are just some of the questions that restaurant analytics software can help answer, providing you with the analytics insights needed to make informed decisions.

Why is it important? Marketing-driven decisions

Identifying your top-performing delivery platform helps you see which channel drives the most revenue. With this insight, you can amplify your success by focusing sponsored ads and promotions on that specific platform.

How Polaris ERP Helps?

Polaris ERP provides a detailed analysis of all your sales channels, allowing you to drill down into your top delivery platforms by order volume and order value over any period. Plus, with AI-powered recommendations, Polaris ERP shows you ways to boost revenue and profitability by capitalizing on your best-performing platforms.

Top performing menu items

This insight shows you what menu items were most frequently ordered across delivery platforms over a certain period of time. 

Why is it important? Increase your restaurant’s client reach

Knowing which menu items perform best is crucial because they are the key drivers of your revenue. With this insight, you can run promotions and targeted ads to boost their popularity even further, and reach more potential clients. Even a 10% increase in orders from these efforts can significantly raise revenue, helping your F&B business reach its growth potential.

How Polaris ERP Helps?

Polaris ERP contains very powerful reports to help you understand the popularity and profitability of your menu items across all sales channels. The platform provides a menu engineering matrix, which shows the most popular, most profitable and least popular and least profitable menu items. You can check if the most popular items per restaurant are also the most popular items for your delivery channels. This helps you understand your customers’ patterns and customize your offering to suit various sales channels, including delivery.

Average order value

This insight reveals how much your customers typically spend on delivery orders. You can track the average order value by branch (if you have multiple locations), as well as by day of the week and time of day, to understand spending patterns and fluctuations.

Why is it important? Predicting Demand

Knowing your average order value is important because it can give you information about the potential revenue you can get per day, week, month, or even per year. This insight can help you predict demand and align your staff and inventory accordingly. For example, if you notice higher average order values on weekends or evenings, you can adjust schedules and inventory to accommodate busier periods. 

Additionally, tracking this metric lets you identify opportunities to boost revenue, such as targeted upselling or bundling strategies that can increase the average order size and maximize profits.

How Polaris ERP Helps?

With Polaris ERP you can easily track the average order value across multiple locations, different timeframes, or periods of time. In addition to this, the platform is equipped with AI (artificial intelligence) technology that looks into the data from all the connected systems (sales, purchase, inventory, accounting, recipe management) and can identify areas of improvement, so you can reach further profitability and cost savings. 

Historical sales trends from delivery orders

The historical sales trends insight lets you see the evolution of your sales across any period of time that you are interested in analyzing. This will tell you, for instance, if your sales coming from delivery channels have increased, or on the contrary, decreased, from one year to the next.

Why is it important? Restaurant Data Insights for Business Decisions

Knowing your historical sales trends from delivery apps is essential for growth optimization. If sales are increasing, you can fine-tune strategies to sustain momentum; if they’re declining, it allows you to proactively adjust tactics to boost revenue. This analysis might tell you something you didn’t know about your business, such as the causes of increase or decrease in sales, which can help you make informed decisions moving forward.

How Polaris ERP Helps?

Polaris ERP provides historical sales trends for your entire restaurant business or specific locations, over both short and long timeframes based on your needs. You can view yearly sales data to identify top-performing delivery channels and specific apps that drive the most revenue. Beyond restaurant analytics insights, Polaris ERP also offers data-driven recommendations on strategies to boost sales, ensuring accuracy by basing suggestions on your real performance data.

Delivery radius and reach

The delivery radius and reach insight shows the areas your restaurant can deliver to based on location (radius) and highlights the average customer base within those areas (reach). This helps you understand the potential demand in each zone, allowing you to assess which areas have the greatest opportunities for growth.

Why is it important? Maintain Food Quality

Knowing the radius that you can deliver to is important, because the delivered orders need to reach the client preserving its quality. If an order takes longer than 30 minutes to reach the location, the food might get cold, and the quality of the food will be diminished. On the contrary, when delivery drivers can reach on time within the assigned area the quality of the delivered food will be uncompromised, which will influence further ordering from satisfied customers. Understanding reach helps in tailoring marketing efforts and promotions to specific zones, maximizing reach and profitability in areas where customer demand is highest.

How Polaris ERP Helps?

Polaris ERP provides a specialized feature that allows restaurant managers to assess delivery reach by showing how far drivers can deliver while maintaining quality and cost-efficiency. While it may seem that increasing the delivery radius boosts revenue, Polaris ERP helps identify an optimal delivery range – usually between 3 to 5 km – where drivers can reach customers within 30 minutes. This range balances maintaining food quality with keeping costs low by minimizing fuel, labor, and vehicle wear. This insight enables managers to serve areas that align with quality standards and operational efficiency, supporting a better customer experience and a more profitable business model.

Average delivery times

This insight provides the typical time it takes for your drivers to complete food deliveries, factoring in the distance to each delivery location and the time needed to fulfill each order. 

Why is it important? Maintaining customer satisfaction

Knowing your average delivery times is essential for setting accurate customer expectations, optimizing driver schedules, defining the most profitable delivery areas, and ensuring food quality upon arrival. This insight also helps control delivery costs, as shorter, consistent times reduce expenses like fuel and labor, contributing to high customer satisfaction and greater efficiency in your delivery operations.

How Polaris ERP Helps?

Polaris ERP provides detailed reports that track delivery times for each order, allowing you to see the average time required to complete each delivery. It identifies which drivers perform best and highlights peak times that record the longest delivery durations, factoring in variables like traffic. Additionally, it breaks down the entire process from order placement to delivery. With these restaurant analytics insights, you gain a clear understanding of the operational areas that need improvement – such as meal prep or delivery time – so you can refine your delivery services and ultimately increase revenue.

Reaping the Benefits of Delivery Platforms

As a restaurateur, staying ahead of changes in the F&B market is crucial. Delivery services have become one of the biggest shifts in recent times, offering both benefits and challenges. To fully capitalize on this new revenue stream, it’s essential to understand your data and have real-time access to key restaurant data analytics that can help you make informed decisions to grow your delivery profits. Here’s where Polaris Technology steps in, providing you with powerful insights to maximize your revenue with Polaris ERP.

You may also be interested in:

Book a free demo