With apps like Seamless, UberEats and Deliveroo, the food delivery market is thriving. But it turns out the process of registering a new restaurant on these apps might not be as stringent as you’d expect.
London based Josh Pieters demonstrated how people who think they’re ordering from an established Italian restaurant could end up with a microwave dinner. Pieters and two buddies launched a website for the “Italian Stallion” eatery, listing his own apartment as the address and buying Instagram followers to bolster its social-media presence to impress Deliveroo. Pieters and his friends took funny food photos, posted nonsense recipes and registered “Italian Stallion, Ltd” before ringing up Deliveroo to explain their lack of a hygiene rating. Pieters spoke with a Deliveroo representative on the phone who tells him that he can operate without a hygiene rating as long as he’s put in an application for the inspection.
Deliveroo, headquartered in London with operations in 200 cities around the globe, promptly sent Pieters a tablet to take orders with, and he was in business: Delivering prepackaged food from the grocery store downstairs.
Pieters and his team managed to register their new “restaurant” — a.k.a. Pieters’ kitchen — on Deliveroo and begin selling microwaveable meals that they purchased at the U.K. supermarket chain Waitrose to paying customers with little to no difficulty.
Pieters says that the process of getting his restaurant, “The Italian Stallion,” on Deliveroo took about two to three weeks. It was a lot of back and forth making sure everything was right and then getting them signed on, waiting for the tablet to arrive and other details.
On the day that Pieters made The Italian Stallion available for delivery on Deliveroo, orders started coming in as soon as he added a discount to the restaurant. He and his partner then began having to run down to the Waitrose below Pieters’ apartment, pick up whatever ready meal the customers had ordered, heat up the food, package it and bring it down to the delivery person in the allotted 15 minutes that Deliveroo allows for food prep.
They weren’t sure how it was going to work. At first they thought they might have to have the restaurant open for a week and get as many orders as possible. But as soon as they turned the discount all of a sudden we got loads of orders. The only problem was they had to run up and down the stairs to get the food.
They were obviously selling microwavable meals at a premium price to people. To keep up with the ensuing demand, they constructed a bucket pulley system along the side of the building, to get meals from the grocery store into their apartment’s microwave faster.
In each meal delivery, Pieters’ crew included a note and the customer’s cash back in an envelope since they were upcharging so much for microwaveable meals. But judging by the feedback they received on the food, getting the money back was just an added bonus. Customers said that the food was great.
Pieters made a video of the prank and it was watched over 183,000 times in 4 days. Brilliant !
I made the mistake of biting into some half frozen microwave food Then I realized that wasn’t well thawed out