How Yucca De Lac Delivered Ready-to-Reheat Meals to Bolster Revenue
Due to COVID-19, Parnell Pang had to close the dine-in services of his restaurant, Yucca De Lac, and rely solely on take-out orders. Revenue dropped by nearly 90%, and his staff of 25 shrunk to just six team members.
To mitigate the negative impact on his business, Parnell focused on increasing Yucca De Lac’s delivery business.
Yucca De Lac uses two types of delivery: hot meals and ready-to-reheat meals. Their hot meals are delivered through third-party delivery services like Postmates and DoorDash. Meanwhile, Parnell’s staff delivers the restaurant’s ready-to-reheat meals.
When Parnell first started delivering these frozen meals, his team only made a handful of deliveries each day (from 5-10). With such a low number of addresses, he could put them in Google Maps and “eyeball” the stops to optimize the route. At that point, planning routes in Google Maps worked because Parnell only had a few stops to make.
But as orders for their frozen meals increased, Parnell went looking for a better tool that could handle more than ten stops per route and could create a legitimately optimized route, not just the best guess.
Not using Circuit for Teams? If you manage a team of drivers and want a simple, cost-effective way to keep track of them (while making their routes more efficient), sign up for a free trial of Circuit for Teams.
How Parnell Uses Circuit for Teams to Help to Optimize Delivery Routes and Send Out Tracking Updates
Parnell’s customers order their frozen meals in advance — at least the day before, but often a week or two in advance. This is perfect for Parnell because he knows where his delivery team is going the night before.
He takes the addresses and sorts them into specific cities or neighborhoods — that way his delivery team (which consists of 2-3 drivers working part-time hours) doesn’t have to drive all over the Palo Alto area. Instead, he can have a driver focus only on making deliveries in or around Menlo Park, for example.
But he still needs to optimize the route. That’s where Circuit for Teams comes in.
Parnell takes customer orders from Shopify and simply copies and pastes customer addresses and drops them into our Circuit for Teams app. Then, Parnell can legitimately optimize routes as well as plan routes without worrying about whether or not the route is more than ten stops, as there is no limit to how many stops are in your route when mapping your deliveries with Circuit for Teams.
Plus, Parnell’s delivery team uses our “Recipient Info” feature, which gives their customers a notification when drivers depart and when they arrive. This helps make sure that customers are home for their order — a requirement for getting frozen meals delivered.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Parnell’s revenue was down 90%.But thanks to his focus on delivering frozen meals to his customers, his restaurant brought in 7x the revenue versus what they would have done if he hadn’t made any changes.
Yucca De Lac: Going Forward
Yucca De Lac can now have their patio open, which allows them to service more customers than before, but life is far from being how it was.
As COVID-19 still looms over the restaurant business, with reduced capacity and general concerns customers have about eating in public, Parnell doesn’t see the delivery side of his business going away anytime soon.
Not using Circuit for Teams? If you manage a team of drivers and want a simple, cost-effective way to keep track of them (while making their routes more efficient), sign up for a free trial of Circuit for Teams.