For Deliveroo, the ability to continuously match countless data variables enables it to deliver faster. We recently caught up with Rose Ahearne, Senior Manager Data Platforms and Engineering to find out how the company optimizes its operations using Snowflake’s Data Cloud.

As one of the world’s online food delivery market leaders, with over eight million customers across 11 countries, Deliveroo has seen huge growth since it launched in 2013—demonstrated by the scale of its partnership with Snowflake. 

We recently caught up with Rose Ahearne, Senior Manager Data Platforms and Engineering at Deliveroo, and talked about the company’s data journey with Snowflake’s Data Cloud. 

Driven by data but restricted by technology 

“By 2016, Deliveroo had already grown many times over,” said Ahearne. “We found our existing data solution wasn’t the best fit for our existing or planned growth. An information bottleneck could restrict our scale—less than ideal for a growing company.” 

With data critical to the company’s ability to continuously improve its service, Deliveroo looked for a solution with performance or scalability to both cope with their existing workload and take on additional demands as the company expanded. 

That’s why Deliveroo looked to Snowflake, migrating its entire data environment to the platform. 

125x data volume increase and 55x more queries processed 

The amount of data the company now holds and processes in Snowflake has since risen from 17TB in 2017 to 2.2PB. What’s more, its daily query volumes have increased by 55x, from 55,000 to 3.1 million. 

The dramatic rise in daily queries is mostly due to increased orders, global expansion, and a wider range of products on offer. Most often, Deliveroo uses these queries for scheduled data preparation, getting datasets ready for use. 

Reducing delivery times—benefiting customers and riders alike

But perhaps the most exciting aspect of Deliveroo’s work on Snowflake—and its most data-intensive—is the company’s use of sophisticated algorithms to calculate the most efficient ways to match customer orders with vendors and riders. 

For example, its scheduling algorithm uses machine learning in Snowflake to constantly recalculate order timings based on a wide range of factors and variables. This can include the type of order, location, time and day, number of available riders, number of live orders, and the distance between the vendor and customer. And because the algorithm never stops recalculating using machine learning, it becomes increasingly accurate with every customer order. 

“Machine learning on our data helps to predict the time it takes to make a meal and streamline the delivery experience,” said Ahearne. “. This means riders can complete more deliveries and increase their earnings, restaurants can sell more meals, and customers can get their food faster.” 

Wide-ranging benefits for the whole organization 

And it’s not just customers that benefit from Deliveroo’s data strategy. The way Deliveroo uses Snowflake’s Data Cloud also helps it identify new locations—including the company’s new delivery-only “Editions” kitchens. 

Snowflake’s third-party integration capabilities and its ease of use also play an increasing role in the platform’s popularity at Deliveroo. Ahearne explained: “We’ve tripled our Looker users and grown our data analytics team. Our data science organization is now one of the 

largest in Europe. We find that people who know Snowflake can just jump on board and deliver impact from day one. In fact, any SQL experience sets them up for success.” 

In addition, every team in the company now benefits from a single source of truth in the Data Cloud. “As we experiment with data, we’re using Snowflake more and more,” said Ahearne. “This means bigger datasets than ever before, including all our website and app interactions.” 

Limitless data possibilities 

As Deliveroo continues to deliver to millions of customers, access to quality data will be critical. That’s why Ahearne and her team are taking advantage of data lineage, cataloging, and quality tools to compliment Snowflake—including the Snowflake Data Marketplace. 

“The Snowflake Data Marketplace offers us even more opportunities—there are more providers on there than ever before,” said Ahearne. “It means there’s an opportunity to leverage datasets directly in Snowflake. For example, we can consolidate automation and ingestion tasks, including the associated costs.” 

Get the complete picture 

You can watch the full webinar on demand here—including an informative panel discussion about driving change through data with Eva Murray, Lead Evangelist at Snowflake; Rose Ahearne, Senior Manager Data Platforms and Analytics Engineering at Deliveroo; and Catherine Wilks, Senior Director at Slalom.