During these hard days, the covid-19 pandemic took a significant blow to the foodservice industries. Many restaurants had to choose the food delivery service to maintain the turnover. For this, choosing the suitable food delivery packaging for your dishes is particularly important.
Many restaurateurs think that food delivery service is the same as the takeaway, just to pack the food in the containers. This is a great misunderstanding.
When your guests ask for takeaway, he had known the dish in the bag enough. Even when he unwrapped the package and found that the food flavor worsened because of the extended storage, he would not think that’s your fault.
In the food delivery service case, your customer knows nothing about the dish until he opens the package, and he may be full of anticipation. But if he finds the food disappoints him, he may never order from you again.
A problem that troubles restaurateurs and chefs for a long time – how to keep the delivery dish as high-quality as the dine-in ones. That also influences your brand’s position in your guest’s mind. Cooking, packaging, and delivery are the keys to this problem. Every chef should have their own cooking crafts about the delivery -foods, we won’t talk about it here. Packaging and delivery have a closer relationship. Your packagings must afford any situations they may meet during delivery.
There are two ways for food delivery service: by the restaurants themselves or the net platforms(like Uber Eats.) No matter in which way, the following problems often happen:
Choose suitable food delivery packaging can solve the problems to a great extent.
The qualified delivery food packagings must be with the following functions:
Food safety must be put first always; this more crucial during the pandemic. And you will never want some food safety problems caused by the packagings to harm your guests or influence your brand reputation. When purchasing food packagings, you must choose the ones made from food-grade materials; they won’t cost too much more. Meanwhile, you should ensure that the packagings are without any smell. Because it doesn’t only influence the dish flavor, your guest will also think it’s not safe even it is food-grade.
Many countries have a rigid requirement for food packagings on the environmental performance. They must be biodegradable, compostable, and eco-friendly. Even in countries without any environmental requirement, people also getting more and more care about this issue. Offer eco-friendly food delivery packaging that can make guests more palatable with your brand. But there will be a little higher cost on the green packagings.
Some starches-contained deli like dumplings and fried chickens are easy to stick on the container and lead to a bad experience. Thus, we can see that most disposable paper or aluminum containers have a layer of PE-coated film inner; that solves the sticky problem well. Of course, you can also choose to place a piece of silicon paper inside the box.
Dishes like spaghetti and noodle will getting mushy in long storage. Packaging noodles, soup, and sauce separately is a common way. A better way is to packaging noodles in a container with air holes. Under a well-ventilated space, noodles will not get mushy so fast.
Hot food always brings happiness. One con of food delivery service is that after a long time of storage and delivery, the dish got cool, and the oil even freezes if the temperature is low. The disposable packaging often does some help on it by increase the wall thickness. But if you want a better heat preservation performance, you can consider the food delivery packaging bags with aluminum liner.
Using paper bags or boxes to pack fried food is often meets a situation in the oil leak and dirty your hands. The packages with PE-coated film can do with this problem well; it can also prevent the soul from leaking.
Under the influence of the pandemic, the food delivery requirements are getting more and more. How to increase the dish-prepared efficiency, making the packages delivered to your guests faster is a problem also needs to be considered. Except for optimizing the cooking flow, choosing suitable packages can also give a little help.
Every restaurant has its own specialties. If you have rich menus, you need to set up a reasonable preparation strategy for dealing with the surging orders from food delivery services.
There are various delivery food packaging styles, such as single-compartment, multi-compartments, with air holes, and simple paper food bags. To some dishes which may be less affected by time, you can prepare them in a single-compartment container in advance. To the popular menus, prepare them with multi-compartment boxes. It can increase your work efficiency well. Of course, the strategy needs to be set up according to your actual order status.
This point is for food delivery bags. The delivery man delivering your order in many ways, some you may even be unexpected. If your food bags are not strong enough, they may break during the journey and leads to the food fall down the ground. In this case, you have to reprepare the order and get a negative comment from your guest. It is necessary to choose the food delivery bags with enough weight capacity according to your dish.
Excellent delivery packaging can increase your service quality and guest experience; they will think you are a brand worth trusting. If the packagings are eco-friendly, your brand image will grow greater.
Suppose you are enough in the budget, you can choose the food packaging with custom design printed. With a unique appearance, well-marked logo, attractive slogan, the guests will remember your brand better and boost the repurchase rate.