Editor’s note: Today's post comes from Damien Leroux, CTO at Frichti, a food startup on a mission to deliver healthy, tasty, and affordable meals to Paris doorsteps, making it possible for hardworking urbanites to enjoy food that’s both convenient and good for them.
The reason I joined Frichti a year ago is simple. I love good food. And I think healthy, sustainable food is one of society's most important responsibilities. I have two children, and like any parent, I want to give them a better life. Fostering a world filled with delicious, healthy, and eco-friendly food is, I think, a good start. That's why I believe in Frichti’s vision, and why I’m helping to develop digital solutions to make it a reality.
What we’re trying to do at Frichti is invent the future of food delivery. We cook our own restaurant-quality dishes with fresh, seasonal ingredients from our kitchen and the meals are delivered anywhere in the Paris region within 20 minutes on average of ordering in biodegradable packaging, from a fleet of electric bikes.
We’re very invested in being an eco-friendly company—from using biodegradable packaging to keeping our ingredients seasonal, to running a ‘green’ delivery service (our trucks for larger deliveries use natural gas, too). In addition, we’re focused on minimizing food waste, to both keep costs low and support sustainability in a world where millions of people go hungry. In addition, we want to spread happiness among the famously demanding diners of France, with delicious food made from premium ingredients such as chanterelle mushrooms and organic salmon, close to the price of a fast food meal.
To make our dream come true, we need the most powerful digital tools possible. For a food delivery firm like Frichti, that means game-changing mapping and data platforms that give us extreme precision in planning routes and meal quantities. We adopted Google Maps Platform two years ago and discovered an immediate transformation in our capabilities.
Our team uses Google Maps Platform to carry out mapping of the Paris topography, calculating factors such as distancing and street layout to optimize our delivery zones for maximum efficiency. With the Maps JavaScript API, there's smart thinking about how hubs are distanced one from another, and how much food each hub should generate versus another.
We use BigQuery, Google Cloud’s enterprise data warehouse, to process data from past orders, and then synchronize the demand profile of each zone in Google Sheets. From there, we generate dashboards that combine with our own routing algorithms, ultimately enabling us to quickly bring restaurant-quality meals to Parisian workplaces and homes.
By using Google Maps Platform, BigQuery, and Sheets, our business team can make accurate judgments about how much food and what dishes to prepare, and how many couriers to have on call. As a result, we can reduce food waste and courier deployment inefficiencies.
A mouth-watering example of what all of this allows us to achieve? Ravioli with ricotta, parmesan, and truffle sauce for €10.90.
The Maps JavaScript API enables another key feature on the Frichti platform: real-time tracking of the delivery bike. By opening up visibility on where a delivery is at a given moment, we’ve reduced calls from hungry customers checking on their food by 75%; we’ve boosted our repeat customers, too. It can be a great stress for customers to think that their food might be late, but by using Google Maps Platform, we’re able to give them visibility, and ultimately peace of mind.
With COVID-19 bringing unique challenges to daily life for Parisians, at Frichti we're playing our part simply by doing what we do best: bringing nutritious food to their doorsteps. With Paris under lockdown, our deliveries are a lifeline not only to good nutrition, but normality, for families and people working from home. Under our #FrichtiForSaviors initiative, we’re also working hard to deliver healthy meals to people in severe need, such as hospital staff working around the clock to save lives.
We partnered with a local university to deliver meals to 4,500 students under lockdown, while cafeterias were shut. For this, we developed a custom solution to accommodate the average student’s budget of five to seven euros a meal. As we built the solution, charting efficient delivery routes and minimizing waste through predictive modelling, our entire team was working from home. Then, like now, it’s more important than ever that we’re able to work together productively online. With Google Cloud, we have the means to do that, and to make sure healthy eating is always an option, in bad times and good.
For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.
