So often our home delivery food dreams are dashed. We’ve all been there: it’s been a long day, the cupboards are bare and nothing appeals more than a hot meal, cooked by someone else and brought right to our doorstep. No shopping, no cooking, no fuss. Until it doesn’t quite go to plan.
The curry isn’t hot. The pizza has the wrong topping. Or the thing just takes far too damn long to arrive.
However those aren’t issues for customers of a new on-demand food delivery service in London. Pronto’s business model is simple: all dishes are made from scratch in-house, using only fresh ingredients, and delivered free of charge (no minimum spend) within 25 minutes of the order being placed. Just to make it even more special all Pronto couriers wear a bowtie. Cute.
So quick is the Pronto service that founder James Roy Poulter and his team have had to reassure customers that it really is as good — and easy — as it seems. And it seems the people of London are putting their trust in Poulter and his co-founders Simone D’Amico and Lukas Dolezal. Despite never having a marketing budget, they receive thousands of orders per month and repeat business is huge: 92 percent of customers who ordered in July decided to order again in August, reported Forbes.
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So what’s on the menu at Pronto? The first thing to catch my eye on the website is the healthy chicken burger: “Grilled butterfly chicken breast, buffalo mozzarella, sun-blushed tomatoes and green pesto all piled high in a bloomer and served with a hearty spinach and sweet potato side salad.” At £8 it’s far less than you’d pay for a similar dish in a London restaurant (and if the hype is to be believed it tastes just as good).
The lean lamb meatballs (£9) are equally tempting: “Tender hand made lamb meatballs served in a delicious, fresh cherry tomato sauce. Served with a side of grilled courgettes and a bed of mixed wild rice. Finished off with fresh herbs and feta (sic).”
With only six main dishes (falafel quinoa salad being the sole vegetarian option) and three desserts there’s plenty of scope for expansion, which is presumably part of the plan when the business is scaled up, thanks to the £1 million in funding the trio have raised from London VCs including Playfair Capital, Seedcamp, the London Co-investment fund and The Next Web founder Patrick de Laive.
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What I love about the online menu is that comprehensive information is provided for each dish, including a full list of ingredients with allergens highlighted in bold, nutritional info and the percentage of daily calorie intake it provides.
More brownie points go to Pronto for sourcing all their ingredients locally in London and trying to reduce their waste by giving leftover food to local charities at the end of each day.
Alas I’m not in London so I can’t put the 25-minute delivery promise to the test. Pronto could be great rolled out across the U.K. — let’s hope it happens and we can ditch our fears about soggy pizzas and cold curry.
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