After working in e-commerce start-ups in Europe and Southeast Asia for several years, Spaniard Tristan Torres Velat started the Singapore arm of Deliveroo last October to fulfill a gap he saw in the food delivery business here.
Over the last six months, Mr Velat has grown to company from a one-man show to a 60-man company. He now oversees a fleet of over 1,100 riders servicing 1,200 independent and high-quality chain restaurants. This week, the company announced that it will also start investing in kitchen spaces under the Roobox initiative.
In this exclusive interview with the Michelin Guide Singapore, we learn more about what drives this intrepid foodpreneur, and why he chose Singapore as the first stop outside of Europe for the London-based on-demand premium food delivery service.
How and why did you get into the food delivery business?
I have lived and worked in Singapore for the last three years and as a father of three, I have always found ordering food here to be a nightmare. You never know when your food will arrive, or even the state it will arrive in. Before we started Deliveroo, a one hour and 15 minute wait for food delivery was accepted as a norm - this is not acceptable. I felt that I could change the food delivery business in Singapore.
So how is Deliveroo different from other food delivery services?
First of all, we want to change the misconception that the only food you can get delivered in Singapore is fast food. At Deliveroo, we only work with eateries and restaurants from the mid to upper-tier, and even Michelin-starred restaurants.
Secondly, we want the food to arrive in optimal conditions, so we only deliver from restaurants that are 2.5km away from the customer. To achieve this, we have divided Singapore into 22 different zones. Each zone is treated as an independent, hyperlocal market with its own restaurant, its own riders and its own marketing efforts. By engaging the same riders for each zone, they’ll know their zone perfectly: the locations, the shortcuts, even the regular customers. So we become more efficient.
The third main difference is that we own the entire delivery chain, from the moment a customer places an order in the app until we deliver the food. We don’t outsource. The drivers are on our payroll, and we provide them with the app, the uniforms and the thermal food bags.
What is this new Roobox concept that you’re introducing?
We’re investing in our own Deliveroo industrial kitchens - or Rooboxes - in different zones islandwide. What this means is that we’ll do up the kitchen set up, the equipment and all, and provide them for free to our partner restaurants, and they can cook from there only for delivery. The aim is to not only bring the most loved brands to everyone in Singapore, but to be able to deliver their food in 10 to 15 minutes. We’re going to do some pilot tests in the next weeks, starting with two kitchens in Katong and Tanglin, and then expand it across the island.
Coming soon via Deliveroo Singapore's Roobox initiative: burgers from Three Buns by Potato Head Folk in Chinatown, delivered to your home in Katong in 10 minutes.
You pointed out that one of your aims is to dispel the common association between food delivery and fast food. How easy or challenging is it to convince mid to high-end restaurants to work with Deliveroo?
The cost per square foot for restaurants in Singapore is currently one of the highest in the world. This means that how big a restaurant business can grow is limited by the number of tables it has. Restaurant operators can do more rotations, or open for longer hours, but the limitation is always the space. Once they’ve maximised this space, it costs a huge amount of money to open another outlet. As such, many restaurants are now willing to try other channels, like food delivery, to grow their businesses.
But at the same time, many of them are established brands and they care about their brand is represented. So I always personally do the first delivery for any new restaurant we take on board. Once they see how we do the delivery, how we train the riders, then they really see the potential we can offer.
What’s the most challenging food item you’ve had to deliver so far?
We recently delivered a 1kg Angus steak worth $200 from Meatsmith! We also deliver food from OCF, a fine-dining restaurant whose dishes come with intricate sauces, but we managed to find a way.
We deliver Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream, sashimi, pizza and truffle fries. When was the last time you had a pizza delivered while still crispy? Never, right? But after several trials, we now put holes in the French fries packaging and we place the pizzas in a different compartment in our thermal food delivery bags so they don’t go soggy.
I’m now working on how to deliver steamboat. I’m trying to design a new bag to deliver that. It will be the most challenging thing to deliver in my life.
Food from Michelin-starred restaurants delivered at the click of a button - is that a possibility for Singapore diners in the near future?
In Europe, Deliveroo already works with Michelin-starred restaurants in Paris, London and Belgium, where we deliver meals every single day. Of course, food delivery is not going to replace the experience of having the chef and sommelier there to explain dishes to you by the dinner table, but we can work with Michelin-starred restaurants to develop a special delivery menu. Or even introduce a service in which you order the food, and a waiter comes to your house to set the table with candles.
After all, for places like Ferran and Albert Adria’s Tickets or [the now-closed] el Bulli, you usually only go to them once in your life, because there’s a one year wait and you may not get a table. But after you’ve had the experience once and you loved the food, you may want to try the food again - without the wait - so why can’t we bring it to you?
What’s your outlook on the future of food delivery in Singapore?
There is an amazing potential for food delivery in Singapore. People work so hard and such long hours. They have the money to eat at nice places but they just don’t have the time.
They love food and they love convenience, so for me it’s a huge market. Of the 5.5 million population in Singapore, if just 30 per cent of these people order food online, you have a daily market of 2 million people. Even with all the food delivery businesses existing now, we haven’t gotten to 10 per cent of that. There is still space for new players. Competition is good for everyone, and competition makes you better. It keeps you awake.
That said, delivering food is not an easy business. It is different from delivering people. In the 10 extra minutes a passenger has to wait for a car, he may play with his phone or maybe become a little unhappy, but if the food is sitting there for more than 10 minutes, it "dies". It’s a refund. Its 100 per cent of your profit lost.
And your personal targets for Deliveroo?
I want to ‘Deliveroo’ to become a verb. I want our app to be next to your Whatsapp, email and Facebook apps. I want to be a part of your life. I want to be on the first page of your smartphone, not on the last page, where I store the games for my children. It may take us 4 to 5 years to get there, but we will.
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