Customer Stories / Hospitality
2021
Deliveroo Makes Its Business Better for the Environment Using AWS
Deliveroo is passionate about providing an excellent customer experience for all three sets of its marketplace users—delivery riders, restaurants, and consumers—and for the communities that these customers live and work in. When it comes to meal delivery, that care means reducing the environmental impact of its operations.
“Environmental sustainability is a priority for us as a business,” says Paul Bedford, VP of policy at Deliveroo. “We think it’s important to deliver great food in a sustainable way.”
One way in which Deliveroo accomplishes this is by continually improving its machine-learning algorithms that run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to minimize riders’ travel times between restaurants and consumers. The algorithms optimize delivery routes and find the best rider for each order, so that every delivery happens as quickly as possible and produces as few emissions as possible. Shorter delivery times also mean riders can take on more orders per shift, restaurants can prepare more meals, and consumers receive hot food.
Deliveroo also encourages riders to make deliveries on electric scooters or bicycles wherever possible. Bedford says the use of environmentally friendly vehicles has been “built into our DNA from day one” when it first began offering meal delivery in London.
Scalable Systems Use Less Electricity
The scalability that AWS provides gives Deliveroo another way to operate sustainably, because the on-demand resource model reduces energy usage. Demand for meal delivery rises and falls throughout the day, over the week, and across the year. Using AWS, Deliveroo is able to scale up compute resources when it’s busy, and then scale them down when orders slow.
This allows Deliveroo to use only the electricity that it needs to serve customers and avoid the waste of operating its own dedicated servers or using an on-premises solution that would require it to commit to a static service level.
When it comes to its products and offerings, Deliveroo is always thinking about sustainability. The ordering system, for instance, allows customers to choose whether to receive disposable cutlery.
This opt-out option has reduced the number of Deliveroo meals that contain plastic cutlery by 90 percent. Deliveroo also helps to reduce waste by offering restaurants the option to choose recyclable packaging for serving food to consumers.
Deliveroo Gets Local
Deliveroo’s attention to environmental impact extends to keeping its customers’ local communities clean. For example, Deliveroo works with councils and local authorities to help them clean local beaches and parks, and offsets delivery emissions in 10 markets.
“Even though we operate across 12 markets, at the end of the day, what we do is extremely local,” says Bedford. “We’re helping bring together people who produce great food with the people who want to enjoy great food in their communities. It only makes sense that we want to preserve the quality of life in those communities for as long as possible.”
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