A Cellardyke resident has set up the service to bring delicious restaurant meals to the ‘thriving foodie scene’ that is the East Neuk of Fife.
While many restaurants across Tayside and Fife have reopened their doors to hungry diners this week, East Neuk resident Sarah Bradley is getting the wheels in motion on her new food delivery service, Puffin Picks.
With Fife’s food and drink scene thriving and much of Scotland’s larder grown in the fields and on the shores of the region with many fine dining restaurants setting up shop there, much of its East Neuk community is ‘underserved’ by food delivery apps such as JustEat and Deliveroo says Sarah.
Hoping to change this and add more variety to what’s available is what helped motivate the food marketing strategist to start up the service.
She said: “There are some really nice traditional delivery services here but in terms of getting something a bit more eclectic, we’re not really on Deliveroo or JustEat.
“We’re outside of the radius for those, yet we have a really thriving food culture here and a lot of East Neuk residents are really into food and go to things like the Bowhouse market. It’s a real foodie area but potentially underserved in terms of in-home stuff.
“I think people are now used to getting cold restaurant food delivered through the post these days and lots of restaurants are delivering UK-wide. Locally, we’ve had some good options – The Dreel Tavern in Anstruther and The Harbour Cafe in Elie, and Haar at Home in St Andrews. My neighbours and people I’m speaking to are getting this type of food all the time and lots of mail-order high-end meals.
“But the main way Puffin Picks came about was initially due to a personal need. I was just thinking ‘my goodness, I’m absolutely sick of my own cooking, I don’t feel like going out and having fish and chips or Scotch pie anymore’.
“There was a time when those things were a treat but I found that whenever we as a family would go a little bit further afield, such as to Dundee or Kirkcaldy, the first thing I’d be thinking was ‘What can we eat? What can we buy? Where’s open?'”.
With only a handful of menus available to order from at the moment, customers wanting something a bit different or from further afield, are able to pre-order through the website before Thursday at 6pm, with deliveries expected every Friday.
Sarah added: “The way it works is that we have a pre-order system, and I’ll post the menus up on the Monday of each week, on the website and social media, and customers can come and browse those. The idea is that they’ll be different restaurant menus and they’ll be coming directly from the restaurant and branded with their brand and priced as they would price it.
“They can browse those menus then pre-book their orders by Thursday at 6pm, then they’ll get a delivery at Friday tea time. The food comes chilled, it’s not a hot delivery as we’re being realistic about the fact you can’t get such a broad range of food in this sort of an area delivered hot.
“At the moment, we are just doing deliveries between Elie and Crail. It’s just that stretch of coastal villages but we’ll see as it goes on if it’s worth expanding. It’s also just me delivering the food and I’ve capped the delivery slots for the first few weeks, really just to get the operation and all the processes right.
“I think people have become a lot more engaged with cooking and the beneficiaries include the local farm shops, but also sometimes include the co-op or the local supermarket because we can’t spend our money elsewhere.
Sarah Bradley
“Then I think it will be much easier to bring on a bigger team. The challenge is that we will be delivering in quite a short timescale every week because mostly the food will be produced after the lunch service, we’ll be picking it up between 2pm and 4pm, and then delivering to households between 4pm and 6pm.”
When conducting research before setting up the firm, Sarah realised there was a lot of positivity around creating a restaurant home delivery service, with some establishments unable to get their food delivered to the area.
She continued: “I think people have become a lot more engaged with cooking and the beneficiaries include the local farm shops, but also sometimes include the co-op or the local supermarket because we can’t spend our money elsewhere.
“I thought ‘I’ll go and have some conversations with people and see what the feedback is’, and I had such positive conversations. The first partner I spoke to was CombiniCo in St Andrews. I really respect what they’ve done because they are based in a seaside town with a high number of students from Asia, but didn’t have a decent sushi, or Asian-fusion offering.
“So I really loved them and thought I would speak to them as it’s very different to what we can get in the East Neuk. I think they saw the positive in terms of Puffin Picks being the chance to sell their food to people they wouldn’t normally get to and help them extend their reach.”
From slightly further afield, Sarah also had conversations with restaurants in Dundee in the hope that they would come aboard the service.
She added: “Tahini in Dundee were also really positive and instantly just got it. I think that’s the moment I thought it would be a win-win because it meant the customers could get something to eat and the restaurants were able to sell to people they wouldn’t otherwise.
“Sometimes there’s a business model with delivery services that can be really aggressive. I know that JustEat, for example, can be quite difficult to deal with or quite expensive, so I’ve tried to keep that side of it quite fair in terms of commission. If Puffin Picks grows I want to be able to keep working with the same people.
“I also wanted to give the restaurants the opportunity to hop on and off the service if it doesn’t suit them. They might also decide they’ve got some really exciting new dishes they want to promote for only a few weeks.”
With such an array of options available from Puffin Picks, Sarah’s new delivery service offers something that many of the major firms don’t have – the chance to mix and match your favourite food items from different restaurants.
She adds: “We also allow customers to mix and match from different menus and the more menus we have, the more valuable that will be. For example, last week we had a customer order falafel from Tahini, a couple of bini rice bowls from CombiniCo, and then also some soda and kimchi on the side. Those all came from four different sources. I think for people from larger households that might have to cater for people with different tastes, that would work.”