MyFoodness App a hit with local food lovers

 

MyFoodness App, a food ordering and delivery App, currently operating locally is proving to be a hit with local consumers. 

The App was launched on January 26th this year, and according to its founder it came about after months of research and looking closely at the food ordering and delivery space in Botswana, its many challenges and how these challenges can be transformed into a pot of gold. And the founder has indeed struck gold with this creation. 

Prior to the App hitting the market, customers sometimes faced a number of challenges such as making a call, sometimes a dozen calls depending on the time of the month to a service provider placing an order. They would then have to have the menu read out to them over the phone, which according to MyFoodness App founder Boi Kgathi Rasmussen was an inconvenience.  Additionally, due to the manual nature of this ordering process, transactions were mainly done via cash she says. 

“This presented risks of income loss for restaurants such as in the instance where a customer would call to place an order, food is prepared, and then the customer does not show up to pick up their order. In another scenario, a customer would call and place an order for delivery, and when the food is delivered, the customer is not home,” she explains. 

She also says that there is also the risk of delivery personnel carrying cash around, which in some instances makes them targets for criminals. Hence, we set out to tackle these issues with our App. 

Speaking in an interview with this publication, she elaborates that with the App, customers have the convenience of browsing through menus and placing an order from their phones, from wherever they are (without having to make a phone call).  Payments wise, she points out that, MyFoodness only deals in cashless transactions.

“Customers pay online and receive their food, no exchange of cash, no income loss risk for restaurants and no risk for delivery personnel being robbed,” she says. She further says that they continue to sign up more and more restaurants in order to offer variety for customers. Since the launch, customers are actively telling them which restaurants they would like to see on the App. To date they have 26 restaurants who have signed up. And they currently attending to the issue of backlog of uploading menus, and they are focused on fast-tracking that process. 

Taking one through a step by step guide of how to use the App, she says that customers download the App (Android or iOS), search for restaurants according to their current location, browse through restaurant menus, select items to order, pay online – and voila, the order is delivered right at their doorstep or they can collect their order from the restaurant. 

“The customer is notified through push notifications on the status of their order until it reaches them or until they pick it up, if they chose the pick-up option,” says Rasmussen. 

Some of the highlights that the company has celebrated include raising a seed round of funding from European investors. Others include seeing an increase in transactions the day after the launch, and the volume of transactions are increasing weekly as more and more consumers are becoming aware of the app.

The journey has of course not been without challenges Rasmussen shares. “Our philosophy is ‘Better, faster, Innovative’; therefore, whatever challenges come our way, we document them and quickly move to attack them head-on. We are a start-up and behave 100 percent like a start-up. Meaning, we experiment a lot and we just do things. We do not have year-long processes holding us back,” she states.

So what does the future look like for the company that currently employs 14 staff members locally and six across Europe and other parts of Africa, well, she notes that they are currently building a market blueprint. At the moment they have a few product verticals up their sleeves and they are eyeing two scale up markets in Africa. “But our focus right now is on getting things right and creating great value in our home market,” she says.

About the founder of MyFoodness  Rasmussen is a long time entrepreneur and entrepreneurship and innovation education activist. She founded a successful pre-incubator, named Y-BECA, which currently runs in South Africa, in partnership with the Industrial Development Corporation, Wits University, Transnet and the Transnet Innovation Centre.  She travels back and forth between two continents: Europe and Africa.