Founded in 2012, honeygrow is a Philadelphia-based restaurant known for its stir-fries, salads, and honeybars made with fresh, wholesome, and nourishing ingredients. With 40 locations throughout the Northeast, honeygrow is known for its dedication to serving nutritious meals and providing fully customizable options throughout its menu.
Amy DePaoli serves as the Director of Marketing at honeygrow, and she takes pride in honeygrow’s ethos of honest eating. “We don't have freezers or microwaves — so you're having a very fresh meal that is made to order right in front of you, or it's been made for you if you're doing delivery,” she says.
More transparency with DoorDash Drive
When honeygrow initially offered delivery, they decided to implement it through their own site with a third-party provider, but there were a few major limitations. For JP Thomas, VP of Operations, the initial integration had a few critical missing elements. “We had issues with the integration, and customers didn’t know where their order was and couldn’t get a tracking link via text message,” he says. “Those features just didn't exist for us.”
Despite having a custom integration, honeygrow had no insight into customers’ orders. They weren’t able to view and track orders — even when customers called the restaurants to ask for updates. Without transparency, honeygrow couldn’t assist customers when problems arose, leading to a less-than-ideal customer experience. “We were constantly getting phone calls at the restaurant from guests inquiring about the status of their order,” JP says. “Our team didn't have that information at their fingertips and guests would get upset because they didn’t understand why we didn’t have that information.”
Seamless operations with DoorDash Drive
honeygrow wanted a solution that gave them visibility into their customers’ orders and mirrored the customer experience in-store, so they chose to switch to DoorDash Drive, an on-demand service that provides fast and easy deliveries using a network of Dashers. DoorDash Drive provided honeygrow with a white-label support solution, including a number that customers can call for prompt and dedicated support with their orders, anytime they need it. “Now our guests receive a text message with a tracking link, and they're able to see their order on a map,” JP says. “If the guest has a question about the status of their order, they can reach out to DoorDash directly and get that support to find out where their order is.”
We’re leaving the delivery of the food and the support that goes along with the delivery of the food to the experts, which is DoorDash. It's taken a huge weight off the shoulders of our in-restaurant managers, so they're able to focus on what they're good at - making delicious food and providing an exceptional guest experience.
With one platform handling all the communications for first-party delivery orders, honeygrow reduced delivery times for customer orders and increased its delivery radius. This was especially important for honeygrow, as they take delivery orders as seriously as in-store orders.
“We’re able to get the food to the guests a lot quicker and actually able to reach a much larger radius because that delivery time is so much shorter,” JP says. “We don’t deprioritize delivery. Every order, whether you're a guest ordering at our kiosk, on the [honeygrow] mobile app, or through DoorDash is equally as important and will get made in the order in which it came in.”
Having that real-time transparency for the guests to know where the order is and a realistic estimate for when it's coming has been a game changer.
A successful preferred Drive partnership
Having a third-party delivery partner that understands — and delivers — a seamless experience has been crucial to keeping the customer experience consistent across all of honeygrow’s channels. “When we started expanding into DoorDash, we made the decision to meet our guests where they are,” JP says. “If you want to order on honeygrow’s website, the [honeygrow] app, or on DoorDash, you’re going to want to order how you want to order, so let’s meet you there. That approach has really worked well for us.”
For Amy, the success of the DoorDash Drive partnership is not just customer-facing but internally, too. “Our DoorDash reps are great at understanding what’s going on in the business landscape and where our priorities are as a company so they can help us find solutions,” she says. “The back end of the website is very easy to use so we can quickly get promotions up and running, along with very user-friendly reporting features. That piece is an advantage with DoorDash.”
Whenever we’ve had an issue, the team at DoorDash has been very responsive and great partners in finding resolutions and working to make sure that they don't happen again. Whether it's making sure that we've got the right large order fulfillment drivers assigned to our catering orders or working to figure out a specific problem, our partners at DoorDash are always quick to respond and propose meaningful and successful solutions.
Growing together
With 40 restaurants (and counting) honeygrow is expanding throughout the Northeast. “Our goal is to continue serving unique and nourishing meals that our customers love, creating more demand for the restaurants and ultimately expanding our footprint to serve guests in many more communities throughout the country. ” Amy says. As honeygrow continues to grow, JP sees the DoorDash partnership growing alongside the company. “When we switched to DoorDash Drive, the delivery experience became more positive over time, and we’ve seen order volumes increase,” he says. “DoorDash has been an amazing partner for many years.”
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