Napoli Gang: reinventing food delivery for a European delivery-based restaurant chain

Challenge:

Prior to our collaboration, Napoli Gang relied on third-party food delivery platforms, such as Uber Eats, Deliveroo, and Glovo. They came to us with a strong need for independence and building a custom solution tailored to the needs of their customers. 

The first challenge was how to develop a scalable app that supports kitchens in Paris, Lille, London, Madrid, and 40 more locations. The client emphasized the solution must be easy-to-use, modern, fast, and functional while conveying key brand messages. 

The target number of users was 10,000, with 1,000 orders per hour. As a brand that serves customers across Europe, there would be multilingual support for French, English, and Spain. 

The solution should be unique from competing products but should easily integrate with the client’s external provider—Deliverect.

Another challenge we encountered in this project is time constraints. The deadline was tight and became more intense because the requirements were not precisely defined before the project started.

Process:

The project kicked off with defining the objectives and the high-level scope of work. Once we had enough requirements to start the first sprint, we set up a team of 2 front-end developers, a backend developer, and a project manager. Napoli Gang provided us with the complete designs for the app, and we moved to the development phase. 

For the project management methodology, we used Agile Scrum. Our team developed the product using one-week sprints, starting with the highest priority functionality. We delivered a working functionality at the end of every sprint until we completed the MVP remotely. We selected Java and React Native as the tech stack. This allowed us to build the app in a fast and robust way. The client actively participated in the project, reviewing tasks and giving feedback multiple times a week. 

The development took 6 months.

Initially, we expected to test the order tracking functionality and stimulate the movement of the delivery personnel within a sandbox environment. However, this was not possible. We created a staging environment where only the client’s team could test order tracking with real orders. We moved into testing with the limited users in France within a month. The initial improvements lasted for 2 months, but subsequent maintenance is ongoing. 

Outcome:

We successfully delivered the Android and IOS apps and a web-based back office. The custom solutions offer a better experience to the client’s end-users than third-party apps. We implemented a click-and-collect feature that allows customers to order on the app and pick it up in the store to save delivery costs. They can also order food as a gift for a friend.

Although the product is still in the maintenance and improvement phase, a handful of customers are already using it. Now Napoli Gang has a custom-built app where customers can order food from their favorite Big Mamma restaurants and kitchens with just a few clicks.