Food delivery company revs up regional growth
Wellington food delivery service Delivereasy is planning to ramp up its business by expanding into towns and cities barely touched by its rivals.
The company, which is headquartered in the capital, will start delivering to Petone, Lower Hutt and Upper Hutt residents from October, and plans to launch in Hamilton and Tauranga before the end of the year.
Delivereasy is also looking to head south, with company director and co-founder Blair Kippenberger hinting at launching in Dunedin, Christchurch, Nelson and Queenstown next year.
‘‘After we hit out immediate targets, we are pretty excited to get down to the South Island,’’ he said.
Delivereasy launched in Wellington in May 2016 from a garage in Mt Victoria.
Three months later, Kippenberger and his co-founders Nick Foster and Tim Robinson quit their day jobs and ‘‘went 100 per cent Delivereasy’’, Kippenberger said.
‘‘We didn’t expect to do that for about 12 months, because a lot of startups fail, or they take a lot of time to get off the ground. But Delivereasy blew us away. It just snowballed.’’
The company had experienced ‘‘exponential’’ growth over the past 15 months, he said.
It started by employing five drivers a month, but was now hiring five drivers a week.
In addition, Delivereasy’s first month of orders saw just 80 meals delivered. Last month, that number hit 8000.
Delivereasy launched in Auckland in April this year. The company currently has 20 restaurants on board but the market there had been ‘‘tough’’, Kippenberger said.
‘‘Auckland is a very competitive market, and we knew that going up there, but we knew that we had to have a good presence in the biggest market in the country,’’ he said.
Delivereasy is just one of a growing number of food delivery services looking to extend its reach.
On Wednesday, UberEats began delivering in Wellington, after launching in Auckland in March.
So far, the company, a subsidiary of ride-sharing app Uber, has 70 Wellington restaurants on board.
Meanwhile, Menulog, a company that originally launched in Australia, also has a presence in New Zealand, including Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin, Wellington, Hamilton, Nelson, Tauranga, Napier, Palmerston North and Rotorua.
To date, Delivereasy has signed up 50 restaurants in Wellington, and has about 10 restaurants in the Hutt region.
‘‘We’ve got to keep moving, so we are building our big army of drivers [in the Hutt] and then we’ll get a few more restaurants over the line. But we’ve got 10 already without even knocking on doors,’’ Kippenberger said.