The food delivery service is ready to deliver from restaurants across the country. This means customers can stay home, stay safe and still support much loved local hot spots.
In these unprecedented times, responsible delivery goes beyond convenience. It’s about supporting social distancing and efforts to flatten the curve while helping reignite the economy.
Mr D Food CEO, Devin Sinclair, says:
As a South African brand, we are proud to offer a crucial service during lockdown to ensure we are all doing our part to support government initiatives to promote social distancing. Delivering from restaurants, convenience stores and Checkers MediRite pharmacies on the platform is just one way we are supporting South Africans during the lockdown period while making sure they can stay indoors.Much like the rest of the restaurant industry, Mr D Food has been hard hit by the lockdown. The opening up of restaurants for food delivery will allow Mr D Food and restaurants to try to recover from the impact that five weeks of lockdown have had on all businesses. Mr D Food hopes to offer a lifeline and facilitate a revenue stream for the thousands of restaurants across the country - from local neighbourhood favourites to established franchise chains - that have been impacted by the lockdown.
As a delivery platform with a national footprint and an established audience, Mr D Food offers a built-in ecosystem that can help restaurants deliver without having to operate and maintain its delivery service.
“We will also be implementing initiatives to support the restaurant industry as they reopen. As a first step, we are introducing a commission relief scheme, which reduces the commission rates for the vast majority of our restaurant partners. We have also allocated marketing funds to drive promotional initiatives to generate orders and revenue for neighbourhood restaurants. Lastly, we will be launching a new feature in the Mr D Food app that will allow customers to support their favourite restaurants, by making a Covid-19 contribution directly to the restaurant when placing a delivery order. We believe that by working together with the industry we can help give restaurants a chance to begin to recover from the financial effects of the lockdown,” adds Sinclair.
Ensuring driver and customer safety is Mr D Food’s foremost priority. Contactless delivery has now been implemented, with drivers instructed not to make physical contact with customers and to maintain a safe distance. Bags will be placed on a surface indicated by the customer, the driver will then back away and allow the customer to safely pick out the order themselves. Cash payments have been deactivated and customers can use one of the other secure electronic payment methods available in-app: credit or debit card, instant EFT or eBucks.
Enhanced hygiene practices have also been implemented. Drivers’ bags are frequently cleaned, and all drivers have access to hand sanitiser with clear instructions to sanitise their hands before and after each delivery or collection. All drivers are now temperature tested daily at each of the driver hubs. Protective masks have been rolled out for all drivers. Mr D Food has also communicated with restaurant partners that they follow the relevant World Health Organisation guidelines for their businesses.
Before the lockdown began, Mr D Food was delivering food from over 5,000 restaurants, in all nine provinces around the country. The South African brand plans to bring as many of these partners back online as quickly as possible. While delivery is already available to over 2,600 suburbs in SA, Mr D Food will also be looking to expand its service areas where possible to make sure more South Africans can benefit from the service.
