Frichti: Delivering delicious and eco-friendly meals with Google Maps Platform

In a foodie nation like France, a great meal after a hard day's work isn't just a treat, it’s a way of life. In fact, it was legendary 19th-century French chef Auguste Escoffier who said: "Good food is the foundation of true happiness."

Five years ago, Julia Bijaoui and Quentin Vacher, a young Parisian couple, found themselves struggling to enjoy a good meal after work. Every night, they were coming home too tired to cook, facing the choice of a mediocre delivery or a restaurant splurge.

That’s what inspired them to launch Frichti, a food delivery startup on a mission to satisfy French palates with healthy, delicious meals at an affordable price, while being kind to the environment. Unlike other food startups, dishes are cooked at Frichti's own kitchen with seasonal ingredients and delivered anywhere in the Paris region within 30 minutes of ordering.

To meet these high standards, Frichti needed powerful mapping and data tools to correctly predict how much food should be prepared at cooking hubs, while reassuring hungry customers through online delivery tracking. Frichti turned to the Maps JavaScript API, as well as BigQuery and Sheets, to help bring fresh, quality meals to the doorsteps of Paris.

"Frichti cooks its own food, and as a result the quality is that of a restaurant, but at a much lower price. This is possible because we control our whole supply chain from cooking production to delivery," says Damien Leroux, CTO at Frichti. "With Google Maps Platform and Google Cloud, we have the tools to make our business model a reality."

Mapping kitchen capabilities to Parisian needs

Frichti's solution is based on carving up a large area into smaller zones served by dedicated hubs and making granular predictions about how many meals should be cooked in the kitchen. It models these quantities by analyzing past data of food demand in each zone, which minimizes waste and keeps costs low.

Using Google Maps Platform, Frichti's team carries out precise mapping of the cities’ topography, calculating factors such as distancing and street layout to achieve optimal delivery zone efficiency, as Damien explains: "With the Maps JavaScript API, there's smart thinking about how hubs are distanced one from another and how much food each hub should generate versus another."

Web Geo Services has been supporting Frichti with Google Maps Platform since 2017. It provided expertise during the transition to the Google Maps Platform with a Customer Care team to answer developers' questions. Web Geo Services and Frichti are now looking at options to bring more innovation into the startup's business model. "Work is ongoing to improve the algorithm for managing our delivery drivers,” shares Nicolas Valençot, “where Google Maps Platform technologies could allow us to improve it through route calculation.”

Frichti feeds data of the past year's orders through BigQuery and synchronizes the demand profile of each zone using Sheets. The team then generates dashboards that combine with Frichti's own routing algorithms to bring quality food to Parisian workplaces and homes, fast. The system enables Frichti to use premium ingredients such as organic salmon and chanterelle mushrooms, while pricing them affordably at 8 to 10 euros per dish.

"We create our dashboards using BigQuery,” says Damien. “Once the data is synchronized, it's used by our business team to make decisions about how much food and what dishes to prepare, and how many couriers to have on call. It means we can reduce food waste and courier deployment inefficiencies."

He says the collaborative nature of Sheets allows real-time updates of data from multiple sources. That's key to providing the dynamic flexibility Frichti needs to continue expanding its platform, meeting demand while fulfilling its mission of sustainability.

"Sheets is a great tool to scale and grow. It empowers our business team with a solution for tracking data and preparing food quantities and different types of products," says Damien. "As a collaboration tool, it allows everyone in our team to share information, even at a distance. I can't see how another spreadsheet solution could allow us to achieve what we do on Sheets."

New features to keep hungry customers happy

The Maps JavaScript API enables another key feature on the Frichti platform: real-time tracking of the delivery scooter. By allowing customers to see where their food is on the road, Frichti has been able to reduce "where's my delivery" calls by 75% and significantly increase repeat customers.

"We know it can be a great stress to think that your food might be late, and with Google Maps we can reassure our customers,” says Damien. “Being able to track food on the app gives them peace of mind and means we’re seeing 75% less delivery queries.”

And Frichti isn’t stopping there; the company is constantly adding new features to help it grow in a fast-evolving business landscape. With Firebase, for example, Frichti is experimenting with new features and receiving instant feedback: "Firebase is a great tool for use that vastly improves our efficiency," says Nicolas Valencot, Frichti's Squad and Guild Leader. “It allows us to dynamically change features with RemoteConfig and A/B test the results. Now that Crashlytics is a part of Firebase dashboard, we have one entry point to manage and monitor our apps.”

Frichti is excited about taking its platform to the next level by empowering its team with data insights and is already looking at Google Maps Platform and Google Cloud to help deliver this. "We know that Google is all about revolutionizing things," says Damien. "So it's great to work with its various teams and know that they're open to working together and helping us reach our goals."