Order Food Through Your Mobile Phone: Your Guide To Food Delivery Apps
Let’s face it. Whether you run the weary commuter’s lane or traverse the lonely car driver’s route, you still end up home late and wanting nothing more than to have a good meal. Weekend coming up? You’d rather stay home than face another carmageddon. Lunch break? Who wants to spend it waiting in line at a fast food joint? Believe me, you do not want to mess with someone who’s famished and seeing double already.
And so to a hungry soul, food delivery apps are like the fairy light at the end of a seemingly endless tunnel. Food at last, when you want it, quickly and conveniently. The timing has never been so spot on for anyone who simply wants to eat the food one craves for without the hassle. And as if that’s not enough motivation, these apps offer voucher codes and discounts to sweeten the deal even more. Another great thing with online delivery apps is you can have access to food from restaurants that normally do not provide their own delivery and are therefore beyond reach when you’re too tired to step out of your home. For a minimal delivery fee that varies among apps and restaurants, you get absolute freedom from lines to the cashier and bumper-to-bumper traffic just to eat.
If you’re still a food delivery app newbie or have not ventured beyond your suki service, here’s a rundown of the most popular apps designed to make you “hangry” no more.
Food Panda
One of the earliest to service a nation of hungry foodies, Food Panda launched its online food delivery service in the Philippines in June 2014, and quickly gained a following as its partner restaurants, now numbering more than a thousand, realized that this service tapped into a market that would have otherwise slipped through their fingers.
When you get a craving for street tacos and only El Chupacabra’s Camarones Al Diabla or Spicy Chipotle Shrimp will do, you realize traffic in the hip Poblacion area in Makati can be a nightmare. Instead, just log on to the Foodpanda website or download the app on your mobile. Confirm your location or let Foodpanda locate you, then start adding food orders to your online cart. For a minimum consumption of P200, Foodpanda sends your order to El Chupacabra where they begin preparing your food for delivery.
Depending on your area, the delivery fee can be fairly minimal. For example, food delivery within Makati is only P35 when you order from nearby spots like Beni’s Falafel, Soban K-Town Grill, or Scout’s Honor. Other partner restaurants include Calderon for good Spanish fare, Hanamaruken Ramen, Hummus Elijah (the best hummus in town!), Mantra Bistro for Indian dishes, and Trufa Pasta Bar for all kinds of pasta, among many others.
GrabFood
Grab is the latest to join the food delivery fray, adding GrabFood to its numerous other services, and according to many avid customers, offering a more reliable and efficient service than the older, more established Foodpanda.
GrabFood has become a favorite of millennials and students who have been known to pool orders of their favorite milk tea, book just one GrabFood so they can share in the delivery fee, and chill on campus as they wait conveniently for their Grab driver to arrive. Beats waiting in line for hours any time. There is no minimum order when you book with GrabFood. What happens is when you place your order with them, they send it to their partner restaurant and have it picked up by a Grab delivery partner straight to your place.
For example, for just a P49 delivery fee within the Greenhills, San Juan area, you can get pizza from Motorino Pizzeria Napoletana, Thai food from Basil, Filipino fare from Sarsa Kitchen + Bar, or breads and pastries from Wildflour Café + Bakery. Other partner restaurants to try include Zubuchon, Buddy’s Pancit Lucban, Sweet Ecstasy, Manila Creamery, and much, much more.
Honestbee
Honestbee’s delivery guys are the most recognizable on the road—those men and women in sunny yellow jackets zipping through the metro, with the logo of a cute, hardworking bee stamped on their carry-on insulated boxes.
Honestbee makes available mouthwatering food from restaurants around you within a five-kilometer radius by uploading their menus on its app. In the mood for Japanese? Specifically Botejyu PH’s Beef Kalbi Sukiyaki Yakisoba? Quezon City residents near Tomas Morato are in for a treat as Honestbee will deliver to you before your hunger pangs go full blown. And they do it speedily—with orders sometimes arriving even before the promised delivery time.
Many of the restaurants are neighborhood joints, not just the usual chains, offering specialties like bestselling lechon belly from Tatang’s, hotdogs and burgers from Pink’s Hotdogs, tempura from Ebi10, carabao’s milk ice cream by Karabella, Taiwanese milk tea from Chachago, and the list goes on and on. Honestbee also delivers five-day diet meal plans like Ketos of Manila and Fit Fuel, available for a P350 delivery fee for the whole week.
Even more impressive and useful, Honestbee provides a unique concierge service where trained shoppers do the legwork and the buying for you. In a rush to set up the perfect party at home and forgot the wine? Honestbee saves the day by bringing to you your wine of choice (from Wine Depot, for example) with time to spare.
Even grocery shopping gets quite tricky to include in your busy schedule, so Honestbee takes care of that too in several ways. Its partner stores like S&R, Marketplace by Rustan’s, Robinson’s Supermarket, even Farmer’s Market Cubao, post their products on the app (with same store pricing) for you to choose from and Honestbee can deliver to your address.
Lalamove and LalaFood
Lalamove is a godsend when you need to send or receive a package as small as a document or actually anything that can be transported by motorcycle, van, or truck. That’s all fine and good, but what about food, you say?
The Lalamove app does not have a list of restaurants near your area where you can happily choose from their menus. But hold on, don’t cross them out just yet as they do have something truly ingenious here. They have what they call Pabili Service, where you can ask them to buy the food that you’re craving, and your Lalamove driver will go straight to the restaurant and buy a maximum of P2,000 worth of food using his own money. The beauty of this is you’re not tied to just the restaurants in the five-kilometer radius of your area. If your heart is set on eating food that’s found only in Makati, the Lalamove driver nearest to it will contact you and deliver your heart’s desire even if you live in Quezon City.
But if you plan to order food within Makati and Bonifacio Global City, Lalamove just launched a separate app called LalaFood, currently available only in those areas. Promising food delivered in less than 45 minutes, Lalafood’s partner restaurants include Camp Curry, 8Cuts, Gino’s Brick Oven Pizza, Nikkei, Café Via Mare, among many others. Watch out for this service to expand soon in other parts of Metro Manila.
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