A Detailed Guide to Developing Restaurant-specific Food Ordering App like KFC

• Mobile
• February 28, 2024

by Parth Pandya

In the era of convenience and discounts, restaurant-specific apps have become the preferred choice for ordering food online. Having your own restaurant-specific food ordering app like KFC does create a difference. When planning to create your restaurant-specific brand, you should consider many things to make it a successful one. This blog highlights everything you need to know on the same.

Whether picking up food on the go, dining in or getting it delivered to your place, customers nowadays want everything to get with conveniences at better discounts. A recent survey revealed that around 71% of consumers globally prefer restaurant-specific apps to order food online, especially to reap personalized loyalty benefits.

Not just that, the global food service market size is projected to grow to US$5423.59 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 10.79%. When narrowing down to the online food delivery market, it’s forecasted to reach US$1.22tn in 2024. To see it a bit further, it’s expected to surpass this count to grow to US$1.79tn by 2028 at a CAGR of 10.06% (2024-2028).

Our favorite chicken brand – KFC, studied all these food service market statistics and prepared its brand to go digital in the early stage to cover the on-demand marketplace.

While developing its app, KFC included many exciting features to allure customers to prioritize it for their go-to food delivery and on-the-way pickup requirements.

From setting examples by creating restaurant-specific online food ordering apps to leveraging our expertise in creating its client-side food ordering app and POS software system, read this blog till the end to check out our research and insights that we have to share with you about the KFC app.

Why Should Your Restaurant and Cafe Business Have An App Like KFC?

Is your restaurant brand new in this food service industry, or have been in this for quite some time? Do your customers like your food, but it’s only limited to the area you do your business? Then, it’s time to scale it.

Speaking from KFC’s perspective, here are the reasons why your restaurant should have a brand-specific food ordering app:

• Finding better business revenue generation opportunities through a dedicated online food ordering app.
• A well-designed fast-food ordering app offers customers the convenience of placing orders from the comfort of their homes, offices, or on the go, enhancing the overall user experience.
• Having a dedicated restaurant food ordering app provides a robust platform for brand visibility, allowing customers to easily access restaurant offers, heading to reinforcing brand awareness.
• Through features like push notifications and in-app messages, you can plan personalized marketing campaigns to lure users to place orders and become loyal customers.
• A brand-specific food ordering app helps restaurants streamline their order management process, reducing the risk of errors and enhancing operational efficiency.
• This app generates valuable data insights, which helps restaurants to learn about customer behaviors, preferences, popular menu items, and more to make data-driven decisions for business growth.

However, for your restaurant brand-specific app to get more attention like KFC and Domino’s Pizza app, it has to have top-notch features like them.

What Features Should A Fast-Food Ordering App Like KFC Have?

From creating delicious chicken recipes to crafting world-class dedicated online food ordering apps with top-notch features, KFC understands what its customers need. Taking the inspiration, your restaurant apps  like KFC must have these features apart from necessary features like user login/sign up:

Start Your Order Window Feature

KFC knows which categories of customers they get. Some enter the store for dine-in, some for order Pick up, and others call the outlet for home delivery. To serve all sorts of customers, in the app, KFC included three options for app customers asking how they would like to receive their orders in the first screen, when they open the app: Delivery, Pick Up, or Dine In.

This feature lets users earn reward points not just by ordering food delivery but also by placing orders from the app for dine-in or pick-up.

Advanced Browse Menu

After the customer selects the order category, they are then redirected to the browse menu/category. By doing this, they should be able to explore the food items they may like to order.

For example, the KFC app has categories like chicken rolls, burgers, snacks, beverages, and different meal combos, which can have different items of different flavors and meal plans.

You can also utilize an AR menu viewing feature in your app that allows users to check how that food item would look on their table. To make it look more insightful for users, you can integrate Nutrition AI (like we have implemented for the Passio.AI project) with it to allow users to check the nutritional value of that item (if you’re offering healthy, guilt-free food items as well).

In-app Promotions and Loyalty Programs

The app like KFC can have this window to showcase users ongoing offers/deals, rewards, and loyalty programs they can take advantage of. You can manually add this offer by implementing APIs/Plugins for in-app purchase deals/offers like apps like Amazon Shopping and other famous on-demand services apps have.

You can also utilize Data Science Solutions and AI/ML solutions to implement personalization programs to offer customers discounts they can obtain by observing their behaviors and willingness to make a purchase. Set certain criterias (checking factors not affecting business revenue generating) to automate this offer showcase/apply, helping to earn customer’s trust for your restaurant app.

Secure Payment Options

Integrating secure and supported payment gateways with your app like KFC can act as a positive factor in boosting customer’s conveniences to use your app more. Your app customers should be able to pay through debit cards, credit cards, digital wallets, or even redeeming in-app reward/loyalty points.

Having integrated your app with multiple payment options can widen the scope for your business to target more customers utilizing different payment methods.

Real-time Order Tracking and Delivery Updates

In an on-demand food delivery app like KFC, it’s necessary to have a feature like real-time order tracking that also sends real-time delivery updates to keep customers informed and excited about their incoming food orders.

Through this feature, customers can track their order in real-time, from order placing and confirmation to its cooking process with delivery partner assignment till the order is delivered. With this feature, they can also track the progress of their delivery partner in the live map through GPS-tracking.

AI-assisted and Live Customer Support Channel

There are some times when facing technical issues, customers do want to contact your business representative for further assistance. That’s where this AI-assisted and live customer support chatbot can be of great help.

When integrating an AI-powered chatbot like Replika in your restaurant food ordering app, it allows customers to get dedicated support from your app whenever they want to. For complex queries, it can divert customers to your support assistant to get instant solutions.

AI Voice Assisted/Activated Order Placing

Making your food ordering app like KFC, AI voice assisted can improve the accessibility of your app. This offers hands-free tasks; not only beneficial for users with disabilities but also for busy people who want their tasks to be done through voice assistance.

We can help you implement this AI voice assistant-based food ordering feature to make your app unique and AI-powered, which only a few or none have implemented yet in the domain of on-demand food ordering.

Check out how we helped our client Will.I.AM enable this AI voice-assisted feature to allow their users to use the I.AM+ app hands-free.

Be Creative with Push Notifications

Whether it’s a food delivery app or any other, having a push notification implemented within it can always be beneficial. Having this in your app can help you in many ways, such as targeting personalized marketing campaigns, sending out order-related notifications, app/personalized offers, and more.

How about informing your customers about their favorite bucket with special discounts and encouraging them to order it? In short, this can play a vital role in boosting your app revisits, leading to better sales.
As per one survey, app push notifications can contribute to boosting app engagements by up to 88% and increase user retention rates by 3-10X, leading to more sales conversions.

Order Feedback System

Of course, your food recipes, preparation processes, and delivery processes are top-notch, but you want that assurance from your customers as well.

Hence, many top food ordering and delivery apps like KFC have this rate and review feature allowing users to share their views on the services, which helps restaurants to improve their services and offer better CX.

What are the Factors that Affect the Cost to Develop a Food Ordering App like KFC?

Depending on the app design and development requirements and other factors, cost estimation for developing a food ordering app like KFC may change, which includes:

• App Features and Complexity: The need for implementing simple features like login/sign-up screen, digital menu, cart, etc., may cost decent. When planning to implement complex features like Data and AI/ML-powered ones and AR/VR ones, they may participate in increasing the cost of developing an app like KFC.
• Choice of App Development Platform and Technology: When planning to develop your app, you have two options, either you can go for Native Android and iOS app development or choose Cross Platform App Development (by choosing technologies like Flutter, React Native, or Ionic). Developing your restaurant app with native technologies may cost more, but does offer reliable app performance. On the other hand, Cross-platform app development can help in  developing performant apps, sharing the same code base for both – Android and iOS platforms, at a lesser cost than native app development.
• Design Requirements: The cost to design an app like KFC with specific instructions and design trends can affect the overall estimation decently.
• Integrations: Be it integrating apps with existing legacy systems or third-party APIs with your app like KFC, both have different effects on the cost. For the third-party API integrations (like payment gateways, data analytics tools, etc.), you may have to pay the subscription/integration fee separately to avail of their services on your app.
• Type of Team You Hire: The expertise and location of the app developer and the engagement model you choose to play an essential role in the cost estimation for an app like KFC.

Apart from these factors, there are others as well that may affect the cost of developing an app like KFC, depending on the app customization requirements.

How MindInventory helped KFC with Food Ordering and Outlet Management App Development

With a commitment to delivering innovative app solutions, MindInventory has also provided mobile app development services to KFC (Indonesia) to revamp their app and help them improve customer experience.

Just as we helped KFC (Indonesia) enhance its app user experience through revamping, we can assist you in building your app like KFC from scratch or revamping it for a better user experience. If you have a restaurant food ordering app idea like KFC, share it with us, and let’s discuss how we can bring value to it.

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