Food! This is a topic that goes through everyone’s mind several times a day, fortunately that never hurt anyone, some even live for food. In today’s office setting, the working population have time as one of the most important variable in productivity, hence that lunch break comes as a distraction, even as it brings the much needed nourishment for us. Fortunately, for companies that have a budget to enable this, they set up a kitchen and hire cooks to facilitate office meals. This doesn’t come cheap and if you are a start-up this isn’t anywhere in your priorities, even the space to do this doesn’t come cheap.
That’s why the food delivery service comes in as a handy thing for today’s working person. It’s even better when all restaurants are bundled in on one portal and you can choose from several, what you would like to consume for that day.
Enter HelloFood
HelloFood was launched in Kenya late last year on the 25th of November and the Hellofood Android app made available on the 13th of February this year.
HelloFood Android app is compatible with all Android devices from Android 2.3 Gingerbread, including small size screens to tablet form factors, including Galaxy Camera. Once you install you are met with a splash screen on loading the app, you then get an option to select your City and general area. This gets you a list of restaurants and food outlets, currently at 83 for Nairobi, that deliver to your specific address. Restaurants that are not in your area but still deliver to your address will still appear.
You then get to see the restaurants that are open for you to order around you. Details include restaurant name, logo thumbnail, minimum order, delivery price information (I am yet to see one that charges for delivery though) and how long it takes for you to get your delivery at your office desk.
Upon selecting a restaurant by tapping it, you get a list of food menus on offer, ranging from breakfast, salads, desserts, special deals, lunches and all the nice names for menus you can think of. Once you have fed your eyes with the various food options, you then tap from the various food categories, e.g. you can select chicken dishes from the options presented. Here you will get them listed with their prices, there is limited information however, about the kind of food it is, so you make decisions based on the titles. On tapping to select the food that pleases your memory (there are no nice images accompanying the food selections, so you rely on memory here), you then choose the number of orders, this goes up to your cart which goes green (not with envy) with the number of orders you have on there.
You then tap the cart at the top right to display your totals, if there was a minimum order price you will see the price difference, meaning you will pay the minimum order price even if your choice food was lower priced, so you better make your choices right, you can go back but for you to clear cart you will need to go back to the list of restaurants. 
Once you are good to go you then proceed to checkout where you feed in your delivery information by registering to the app. You will get an sms verification, good thing with smartphones is that you can view the sms while the app is still on standby and come back to fill in. Once done you can then proceed to make your order. 
Your order is saved so that if you need to make the same order in future, or immediately after 🙂 you can go back to your profile under the My Orders segment to select from previous orders.
Oh! After you order, you get a confirmation message that has your order details including your expected delivery time.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- The HelloFood app is one convenient app that will have you get various options for food deliveries, it can also be a food joint discovery app for many who just landed in Nairobi, or whichever city the app is available (currently serving cities in Nigeria, Morocco, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Kenya).
- You are able to get the same service on the desktop of each site.
- It’s an easy to use app that gives you numerous choices, signing up is easy and happens when you are ready to order.
- Restaurants out of your region but still serve your address are still available for you to opt for.
- You get to pay cash on delivery.
- Short delivery times, you can order at 12 for a lunch time meal, think about it this way, if you got several random visitors to your office, you won’t need to break to get them lunch, just order, with the number they are and you can go on with your meeting.
Cons:
- Well, the price factor; if you are a kibanda (makeshift low priced food joint) type of guy, you won’t get options available for you, walk on brother.
- The food description is just like most restaurant menus, devoid of descriptions for the person who doesn’t know what the food is about, there is no waiter on board to ask specific questions. Customer service would be for hitches in the ordering process and not demystifying food.
- There are still some bugs and you have to click several times once in a while when making selections.
Conclusion
This is an app that does indeed come in handy for the busy person, I personally would benefit from this service as the one hour you spend going out of the office is quite valuable. However there could be still ways to get more restaurants and food joints that are closer to an individual, I would still use the app to get me food from the restaurant a block away that offers fries without that high minimum order price, saves me some time still. I would expect the restaurant next block would get me orders at retail prices without needing some level of minimum order as it’s within walking distance.
Recommendations:
- It would be good to have some image shots of food types as a plus to get our mouths watered, you know how restaurants do with their above the counter adverts.
- It would also help if you can get some random suggestions based on the time of day, like you know; here are some nice lunch suggestions for the vegetarian, or the carnivore.
