As food and restaurant businesses look to conquer every step of the delivery game, they face a ton of obstacles—from too many point solutions to that thorny, final leg of the journey. This week, GetSwift, a leader in last-mile delivery technology for everything from pizza to alcohol and other goods, took aim at that problem with two new acquisitions.
The acquisitions—of North American delivery management platform Delivery BIZ Pro and a popular workforce scheduling provider, Scheduling+—are part of the company’s ongoing strategy to unify all the technology needed to address every step of online food delivery, from farm to restaurant kitchen to the home. GetSwift hopes to capture business that even e-commerce giants have had trouble nailing: streamlined delivery technology from end to end.
Across the globe, Delivery BIZ Pro’s provides software to facilitate delivery between farms and providers of fresh produce to homes and businesses. The fast-growing demand to eat at home (online food delivery is expected to reach more than $24 billion by 2023) rather than at restaurants, dovetails with a demand to get their produce delivered too, with Nielsen reporting that online grocery purchasing increased by 15 percent in the past two years.
One advantage for Delivery BIZ Pro is its ability to reach farms, dairies and other producers on an extremely local level. Its system interacts with over 6,800 local suppliers and of those, more than 4,500 are in locations that e-commerce are unlikely to access.
Delivery Biz Pro’s reach is also broad—and expanding. It has extensive operations on the East and West Coast, along with customers in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the other locations.
"Delivery Biz Pro is a proven and leading delivery management system in the attractive farm-to-table delivery market in North America" said GetSwift CEO Bane Hunter. "With its diverse product offering including front-end ordering, route mapping, and business intelligence, DBP and GetSwift will enable customers to have an end-to-end last mile solution in key markets. We are very excited about the potential to leverage our infrastructure and resources for our combined growth,” Hunter said.
Meanwhile, as e-commerce companies grow their delivery offering, they face a need to efficiently manage the shifts of drivers, cyclers, dispatchers and other hourly workers using big data and AI. Scheduling+ provides a best-in-class suite of staff-management services, including workforce scheduling and payroll, and integrating the technology onto its platform will allow GetSwift to offer a one-stop shop to its customers.
“Instead of having to partner with external providers for this function we are now able to offer this as a comprehensive proprietary solution,” Hunter said.
The moves represent the efforts by GetSwift, which pioneered last-mile delivery technology, to take clients another step further as they look to expand in the growing online delivery market.
This post is sponsored by GetSwift