In a field of struggling food delivery startups, one notable success story has emerged from the fray. Termed “the European unicorn” by TechCrunch, Deliveroo is a British startup that offers fast and reliable food delivery service from a premium network of restaurants.
Deliveroo recently raised a $385 million funding round, boasts an estimated $2 billion valuation and is credited with transforming the way people think about food delivery. What is this unicorn doing differently? How has it found success where so many others have failed?
“Data is baked into every aspect of the organization,” Deliveroo’s head of business intelligence, Henry Crawford said. “Having instant access to data reveals which geographic areas are experiencing a shortage of restaurants and a shortage of particular cuisines so we can create these hubs right at the consumer’s doorstep.”
Deliveroo analyzes customer behavior, gains insights into market trends and responds with swift decisions and rapid execution by using data-driven insights. Snowflake makes all of this possible.
“With data coming from a variety of sources, including web traffic, transactions and customer behavior, having a data warehouse built for the cloud provides one repository for a single source of truth,” Henry explains.“The shift to Snowflake’s cloud data warehouse has enabled us to make good on our promise that got Deliveroo started: To connect consumers with great food from great restaurants, wherever you are, and whatever it takes.“
Snowflake also accommodates Deliveroo’s 650% growth in 2016. Such rapid momentum prompted Deliveroo to expand its business intelligence team from two employees to 14. Additional team members triggered the need for more access to the same data but without impacting performance.
Since Snowflake is built for the cloud, an unlimited number of users can access all of an organization’s data from a single repository, which is critical to Deliveroo’s success. There’s no replicating data, shifting queries and other workloads to non-business hours, or queueing users to preserve performance. Instead, Snowflake’s true cloud elasticity means Deliveroo can automatically scale up, down and out (concurrency) to load and analyze data without disruption.
“None of these future plans would be possible without real-time, concurrent access to massive volumes of data,” Henry said.
What’s next for Deliveroo? Using real-time logistics algorithms to increase the number and the speed of deliveries. Deliveroo’s expansion plans also include an “Editions” program—delivery-only kitchens so partner restaurants can expand their footprint without opening brick-and-mortar locations.
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