How to dine at your favorite restaurant without leaving your house or office

As an apartment dweller in Metro Manila with no culinary skills whatsoever, I have become an expert on having food delivered. I may burn water, but my ordering-out abilities are Olympic-level. Not only have I memorized the numbers of the major fastfood outlets, I can calibrate the order to within P20 of the minimum delivery amount. It’s a gift.

This system has obvious limitations. Woman cannot live on fastfood alone — it goes straight to her hips then takes up permanent residence in her arteries. Also, we need variety and excitement. A meal is something to be looked forward to and savored, not just fuel to be chewed and swallowed. If we could, if our schedules permitted, if traffic did not make daily life twice as difficult as it is, we’d be eating more often at our favorite casual dining restaurants. 

It turns out that we can. 

A little over a year ago a young businessman named Jin Gonzalez was on the treadmill at the gym, watching National Geographic. Jin has always had the entrepreneurial spirit — he started his first business when he was 16 and majoring in interdisciplinary studies at Ateneo. Post-college he got his masters in Entrepreneurship at the Asian Institute of Management and opened a software development company, a BPO for non-voice services like transcription and encoding, and an education and training facility for call centers. 

Jin had just turned over the day-to-day operations of his companies to a management group, and he was looking for a new business to get into. That day at the gym, NatGeo was airing a feature on the billion-dollar quick service industry in South Korea. Apparently in South Korea you can call a number and have practically anything delivered within the hour. The system is so efficient, clients joke that as soon as they put the phone down, the doorbell rings with the delivery.  

The light bulb went on in Jin’s business mind. Could the quick service industry prosper in the Philippines? The most obvious obstacle would be road traffic — how can you transport the product when the highway is a long parking lot, never mind the one-hour promise? However, traffic was also one key reason such an enterprise could succeed. Who wouldn’t want to eliminate the inconvenience and aggravation of traffic when making quick purchases?

There were other factors to consider. Sure we hate traffic, but it’s never stopped us from going out to shop. We do love our shopping, but we also prefer to see and touch what we’re buying. We know better than most that there are disparities between the description of the product and the actual product. What product do Filipinos buy constantly and in mass quantities that can override this consideration?

Obvious answer: Food. Jin started researching the food delivery service, consulting restaurateurs, and studying the logistics. Around this time Jin’s cousin Marco Katigbak returned to Manila from Montreal, where he’d worked in the shipping industry. The sudden death of Marco’s brother had caused Marco to reassess his career plans; he decided to work in Manila to be closer to family.

One day Jin called Marco and said, “Let’s go for a drive.” By the end of the ride they were partners in Quick Delivery. Their company opened on Nov.28, 2009. “It took us 2 1/2 months to get started, from refining the concept to leasing the motorbikes and setting up the call centers,” Marco recalls. Jin’s background in customer service and Marco’s in logistics were put to good use. “It was like starting three businesses at the same time,” Jin says, “Call center, logistics for the riders and dispatch, and marketing. We’re selling restaurants a cost advantage.

“We also had to coordinate with banks to set up payment systems. Each rider has a POS terminal to process the customer’s credit card if she’s not paying in cash. It took us three months to get everything stable.”

Quick Delivery is a service that delivers food from your favorite restaurants to your home or office. It has about 50 restaurant partners in 269 locations, most of them well-known dining outlets like CPK, Florabel, Italianni’s, Mamou, Sentro, TGI Friday’s, Tony Roma’s and Wild Ginger. Many of these restaurants had existing delivery services that they shifted to Quick Delivery. 

“Food delivery has become a major part of any restaurant’s business,” Jin notes. “To do food delivery, a company has to lease motorbikes, hire a call center, do marketing for the service.” Now they just have to partner with Quick Delivery. “We’ve created a solution that takes care of marketing, advertising and promotions, ordering and processing.” Marketing involves publishing Quick Pocket Edition, a booklet that contains the delivery menus of 46 best-of-class restaurants, plus lists of wines and spirits and DVDs for home delivery.

Customers can avail of Quick Delivery service in three ways. First, they can call 2121212 on their landline. They can order off the menus in the Quick booklet or view the full menu on www.quickdelivery.ph. Or they could ask the operator to read them the most popular items on the menus of a particular restaurant. 

Alternative food choices are programmed into the call center’s system. If the customer has specific requirements, for instance vegetarian dishes, the operator can access the menus of all the partner restaurants.

Another option is to reach Quick Delivery by SMS. Customers can text 2910 to get the Bestseller menu of a specific restaurant. To place their order they can text 2910, and the operator will call them back to take the orders. Alternatively, customers can text <order> to 0918-2121212 and the operator will call them. 

To order online, visit www.quickdelivery.ph and click on the “Order Now” button. After you fill up the form, a representative will phone to confirm your order. For advance orders, customers can request a catering specialist at telephone 2121212.

The minimum delivery amount for Quick Delivery service is P500, but customers can order less than that amount for an additional P65 charge above the standard delivery rate. “The customer always pays the same price,” Jin emphasizes. “Our delivery menu prices are the same as the dine-in prices. Instead of the standard ten percent dine-in service charge, you pay a ten percent delivery charge. It comes out even.” Not to mention that you don’t have to leave the house or office, incur added expenses, or lose your temper on the road.

Quick Delivery’s coverage area is within the five-kilometer radius of Edsa from TriNoma to Mall of Asia. A full list of delivery areas is available on the website, or from 2121212. Customers outside of the delivery areas can avail of the service for an extra charge, if they’re amenable to the longer wait.

“We empower the existing brand with a statement: We deliver to anyone, 2121212,” Jin declares. “It’s all about recall — the two and one make it twice as easy to remember.”

“If something goes wrong with the delivery, we take full responsibility for it,” Marco adds. “We always remind customers that orders outside the delivery area will take extra time, and food quality may not be the same.”

Three months after Quick Delivery started its operations, its restaurant partners noticed an increase in their sales. New restaurant partners are coming in, and there are more items available for delivery, such as bags of rice of different varieties, and specialty products such as cakes for Christmas. 

The potential for the quick service industry in the Philippines is virtually limitless — if the entrepreneur studies the logistics thoroughly, and has a firm grasp of the Filipino psyche. For instance, Marco and Jin have noticed that Pinoys like to send each other gifts of food, a habit they are happy to facilitate. For “gift” deliveries, the rider makes an extra stop to collect payment from the customer, then proceeds to deliver the food to the recipient. 

It’s about time someone started a business that traded on our horror of Metro Manila traffic. Today Quick Delivery brings restaurant meals to your home or office; tomorrow they could be delivering gadgets, indie movies, clothes, tennis racquets, books. Our only problem with this service is, why didn’t we think of it ourselves?