Delivering More Meals with Rows
Now more than ever, the food delivery sector is booming. With that success comes more pressure to operate at lightning speed. Have you ever wondered what kinds of tools and APIs help food delivery teams achieve seamless, on-demand service?
We spoke with Mário Tarouca, Head of Business Operations at EatTasty – a food delivery service that works with restaurants to provide weekly menus to its customers. When EatTasty set sights on expansion, the team turned to Rows spreadsheets to get the job done without any of the chaos that usually comes with rapid growth.
No more growing pains
With Rows in their toolbox, EatTasty has saved months of time per year. The team is now more efficient and growing faster than ever. In the past few months, EatTasty went from having two locations and providing only lunch, to having three locations and providing both lunch and dinner.
But how did they do it? Mário says it was all about automation. He introduced Rows to his teams across three locations – Lisbon, Porto and Madrid – after he’d become frustrated juggling multiple tools and platforms.
With Rows’ spreadsheet functionality, operations flowed more smoothly. Communication with stakeholders felt lighter. Mário could focus more on the most pressing growth strategies and tasks.
Rows is now the centralised Hub where EatTasty’s processes live. Since starting to use the tool’s built-in integrations and ability to connect to any API, EatTasty has automated many of their operational processes and saved countless hours (all of which add up to the equivalent of 1.5 extra team members). That translates into more meals and happier customers.
Saving Time on Internal Development
Before using Rows, Mário was running into time bottlenecks. Whenever a new process or tool was to be applied, he first had to speak to the developers. It certainly wasn’t ideal for a company that’s required to be extremely agile on a daily basis.
Then Mario’s team started creating custom-made tools for a multitude of processes directly in Rows.
“Before, we would need to open an issue, send a ticket to the tech team and get into their sprint – depending on if it was a priority or not,” Mário says. “Now, we integrate with our own API and do a bunch of stuff. We can just use one of the formulas in Rows, and bam, it’s done.”
If it wasn’t already clear how much more efficient Mário was with Rows, he actually tracked the tool’s time-saving capabilities across all operational teams. It amounted to 41 days. Per month.
Let’s explore exactly how this happened.
Centralised Hub for Delivery Operations
Communication is vital for EatTasty and timing is everything. Mário’s team used to collect information about the projected orders and manually communicate these changes with each supplier several times throughout the process. Having to sync orders, changes and run these communications on a strict timeline meant a lot of manual work and tool-hopping.
This is where Rows came in. EatTasty created custom tools in Rows by connecting the spreadsheets with integrations that pull data from their internal business applications and send alerts (in Slack and email) directly to the suppliers. These spreadsheets are essentially a combination of databases and forms that are both shareable with suppliers and interactive. They’re part of Rows’ live mode capability.
On any given delivery day, the number of meals EatTasty has to deliver might change. Once this change is entered in the Rows spreadsheet by the EatTasty team, it automatically sends suppliers a Slack message telling them to check the live Rows spreadsheet, which updates in real-time. EatTasty retains full control over the data to edit the spreadsheet and can give access to any supplier so they can check orders.
The interactivity of the whole process helps maintain seamless communication between EatTasty and suppliers. Suppliers must confirm or deny order production within a specific time frame, and if that doesn’t happen, an automatic Slack message is sent from Rows spreadsheet to the EatTasty team alerting them of the situation.
“This centralization is awesome,” Mário says.“We used to have a Slack channel for one thing, a spreadsheet for another and then email to communicate for something else. Now we can bring everything together on Rows.”
A Spreadsheet that Gets the Work Done
EatTasty uses Rows on other teams besides Operations, including Business Operations, Sales and Supply.
For example, the Sales looks for suitable companies to offer meal deliveries to, as well as new and exciting suppliers. Through the Companies Search integration, EatTasty generates lead lists directly from the Rows spreadsheet. The integration connects to LinkedIn and returns the list of companies based on location.
Connecting with Google Maps enables EatTasty to screen for prospect suppliers and invite them to work together. This integration allows users to pull a list of companies around specific addresses directly into a spreadsheet. On top of that EatTasty can enrich companies with additional information such as address, ratings, opening hours, etc right within the spreadsheet.
“We make sure that all the teams have the right tools and processes, and that they work in the most efficient way so we can deliver the best hot food. Rows allow us to do exactly that,” Mário says. “The best part is that the more cities we have, the more time we save. What we’ve created at Rows scales with our operation.”
No Need for Coding
All that customisation and centralisation typically requires vast coding knowledge. But not with Rows: the tool’s built-in integrations and ability to connect to any API don’t require skills beyond basic spreadsheet knowledge.
“This was done by my team, 99% of which are non-tech people,” Mário from EatTasty says. “That’s the most impressive thing about Rows. The fact that anyone who has basic Excel skills can use it.”
At Rows, we’re thrilled to see the EatTasty business scale up. It’s always our goal to help brilliant teams accelerate their growth.
Try Rows for free at rows.com and see how a single, powerful tool can skyrocket your team.
