Running delivery

Delivery is a second business attached to a kitchen, with its own labour model, its own failure modes and its own economics. Pizzerias have run it longer than anyone, which is why they are usually clearest that the hard part is not driving — it is timing.

The handoff decides everything

A cold pizza is almost never a slow driver. It is a pizza that came out of the oven before anyone was available to take it, and then sat. The expensive gap is between the food being ready and the driver leaving, and it is the segment least often measured.

• ✓Time from ready to departure, not just total delivery time. That is the part you control entirely.
• ✓Batch deliberately or not at all. Two drops on one run works when they are genuinely close; done casually it means the second guest gets a cold pizza and never orders again.
• ✓Fire to the driver's availability during a rush, not purely to ticket order — a pizza made with nobody to take it is a worse outcome than one made two minutes later.
• ✓Keep a hot-hold discipline for the gap you cannot remove.

Your own drivers or a dispatch service

Own drivers give you control of the experience, brand contact with the guest, and a fixed cost you carry whether or not the orders come. A dispatch service — where you take the order and a third party provides the driver — converts that into a variable cost and removes the hiring problem, at the cost of some control and a fee per delivery.

The honest test is volume shape. Steady, predictable demand favours your own drivers; spiky demand concentrated in a few hours a week favours paying per delivery rather than staffing for a peak you only hit occasionally.

Radius is a margin decision

Every extra minute of drive time costs food quality and driver capacity simultaneously. A generous radius wins orders that arrive badly, and a guest who receives a cold pizza is a guest you paid to lose.

Set the radius from drive time rather than distance, and revisit it by daypart — the same address is a different journey at 6pm than at 9pm.

Where Opero fits, stated carefully

Opero includes DoorDash Drive dispatch — quoting a delivery, dispatching a driver against an order you own, and tracking its status through to completion, with a webhook and a reconcile poll that cannot disagree about state. It is newly available rather than long-proven, so confirm current coverage and status with us for your area before building a service model on it.

Order ingestion from delivery marketplaces is also early access, and coverage varies by provider — again worth confirming with us rather than assuming. Platforms with mature integration ecosystems may still cover more apps today, and that is a fair thing to weigh.

What is settled either way: delivery orders land on the same kitchen queue and the same menu spine as counter, kiosk and web orders, so the make line works one list rather than several screens.