In every crisis there is an opportunity.
It is one of those phrases that online quote aggregators particularly love, and which they attribute from time to time to Winston Churchill, Galileo Galilei, or ancient Chinese wisdom.
But it is true, and we have never realized it more than now: even in a dramatic moment of uncertainty and difficulty, both health-related and economic, business opportunities can and are arising.
And, we are already seeing it, some solutions found in full lockdown to make a virtue of necessity are proving to be valid and promising even for “normal” times, and it seems they will remain even when this crisis is over.
Catering in the time of Coronavirus
We have a clear example in the food sector: forced to close their premises, many restaurateurs have decided to start making home deliveries.
Naturally, the food delivery phenomenon was not born yesterday: for some years, home delivery services such as Just Eat, Foodracers and Deliveroo had landed in Italy, where they were experiencing gradual and constant growth, both in terms of popularity and of variety of the offer.
But it is undeniable that the quarantine has given this trend a decisive boost, convincing even the last skeptics – restaurateurs and customers – to at least give it a try.
And the results were seen almost immediately.
In a survey published in mid-April, the national observatory Just Eat found that, out of a sample of 30,000 people interviewed, 90% believed that food delivery in times of quarantine was an important or essential service, both for consumers as for restaurants. The percentage of people who said they had ordered food delivery was 60%.
Among the most popular dishes, pizza stands out above all (the love story between Italians and pizza survives every obstacle), followed by hamburgers, sushi, chicken and typical dishes of local cuisine, which many have preferred to order from the restaurant rather than preparing them at home.
And if these are dishes that were delivered to your home even before, there are some new entries dictated by the lockdown: we are talking about ice creams and cocktails, which many had brought home to make up for the forced closure of bars and ice cream parlors.
The health emergency has therefore changed our habits, leading a good number of restaurateurs to choose to reinvent themselves through food delivery, to concretely support their business in a time of crisis.
From the findings of the FIPE Study Center (Italian Federation of Public Businesses) it emerges that, when the first decree came into force, only 5.4% of traditional Italian catering entrepreneurs offered customers a home delivery service, while 10, 4% immediately equipped themselves to be able to offer it. Overall, 40% of restaurateurs said growth in demand for food delivery has been good.
Starting from this fact – the greater diffusion of food delivery in Italy during the quarantine – some predictions can be made, linked to phenomena that will continue to be observed even beyond the end of the pandemic.
Orders of healthy (and ready) dishes delivered to home will increase
Man does not live on pizza alone.
Quarantine has made us self-indulgent, sometimes even decadent in our search for culinary pleasures that lift our spirits. But at a certain point we felt the need to find balance, to start eating healthy again.
Already in March the organic food sector saw its revenues increase by 30% more or less throughout the world.
This leads us to think that there are good prospects for the delivery of healthy and ready meals.
Services have existed for a few years in Italy – such as NutriBees, Squat&Basilico, Feat Food – for the home delivery of reheated dishes, prepared following the instructions of nutrition experts. The functioning of the various platforms is quite similar: through a one shot or subscription order you choose balanced and healthy dishes to have delivered to your home.
Similar projects represented, during the quarantine, an excellent compromise for people who wanted to avoid supermarkets as much as possible, without being reduced to ordering pizza or hamburgers every evening.
The spread of meal kits will grow
During the months of lockdown we discovered or rediscovered our love for cooking.
Quarantine brought out the chef, the pastry chef or the pizza chef in us (do you remember when there was no longer any brewer’s yeast around?).
Well, there is a delivery solution also for those who love to cook: meal kits, packages with all the ingredients and instructions for preparing gourmet recipes, to be delivered directly to your home. You can thus try your hand at creating dishes from great chefs or traditional cuisine, with the kits from Fratelli Desideri, My Cooking Box or Second Chef.
It is a service that has already been popular in the United States for some time, and which in Italy had started to take hold before the pandemic: also in this case the Covid-19 emergency has accelerated the times, and everything suggests that the trend will continue to grow even later.
More and more virtual restaurants and ghost kitchens will emerge
We talk about a virtual restaurant when a physical restaurant – which serves food to customers sitting at tables – opens a sub-restaurant that exists only online and serves customers only at home.
Even more extreme is the case of the ghost kitchen: here the traditional restaurant does not exist at all, there is only a kitchen, a counter, and a window through which to pass the dishes to the riders for delivery.
It is easy to understand how, in times of social distancing, similar initiatives can be very successful, especially because they allow costs for staff and premises to be minimized.
All the phenomena we have discussed in this article have one element in common: the strongly digital approach. Not only because they are based on orders that take place online, through apps and websites, but also because they mainly use social media to communicate and make themselves known.
At a time like this, when physical attendance at venues is limited and risks going into crisis, digital opens doors to unexpected scenarios for the food sector.
In addition to our habits, the health emergency is also changing our relationship with restaurants. It is still early to draw conclusions: for the moment we can only keep our eyes wide open and remain ready to face what is to come.
Sources
- Il Sole 24 Ore, Eight sectors with business and work opportunities in the time of Covid19
- AdnKronos, Not just pizza, ice cream boom and also cocktails: food delivery in the times of Covid19
- FIPE, Food delivery in the time of Coronavirus
- Il Giornale del Cibo, Food delivery becomes healthy: here are the best platforms for ordering healthy food at home
- La Repubblica, Author’s Delivery: with the chef’s instructions the dishes can be finished cooking at home
- Il Post, Restaurants made only of kitchens
