Providoor’s growing pains deliver a culinary bonus

The radical differences between running a restaurant kitchen and operating a popular food logistics business hit hard for Shane Delia last September.

Chef entrepreneur Shane Delia is expanding his Providoor food delivery platform. Picture: David Caird

The radical differences between running a restaurant kitchen and operating a popular food logistics business hit hard for Shane Delia last September.

Overwhelmed by demand, undercooked in the systems department, Delia’s Providoor food delivery platform took a body-blow in the reputational stakes on Father’s Day 2020 that might have crippled a less resilient ­individual.

Hundreds of Victorians got their orders hours late; in some cases, their food wasn’t delivered at all. Providoor boss Delia apologised, blaming the company’s logistics provider, which he said had “bitten off more than they could chew”. No ceiling, he says now, had been put on the volume of orders his restaurant partners should accept: roughly 25,000 that weekend, a quantum leap for the then-fledgling business.

Criticism across various media was robust.

“Basically, the restaurants took as many orders as they could,” he says. “They couldn’t keep up, which impacted on the delivery, and it imploded, majorly. It was a really bad experience for everybody.”

What doesn’t kill you …

Providoor survived the debacle and prospered: Delia says it has now delivered in excess of 600,000 orders in the past 15 months, expanding first to Sydney and, next month, to Brisbane.

“It was a really bad experience for everybody,” he says of ­Father’s Day 2020. Fast forward a year and Providoor delivered “just over” 30,000 orders on ­Father’s Day 2021 “and could have doubled that. The demand was there for at least 70,000 ­orders.

Obviously, we capped it,” he says “but if anything, 2020 was probably the experience we needed … to understand the enormity of our business’s potential.”

And what it could be is global, says Delia. Providoor is looking to launch in either the US or UK or both next year. In the interim, the imminent Brisbane launch and the hump of Spring Racing Carnival are the one-time chef’s focus.

“We are a totally new business now,” he says. “We’ve got a new logistics partner, we are stronger in the back-end from a tech perspective, our team is three times the size, we’ve got a lot more reporting and our forecasting is better. We are a lot stronger, and our restaurant partners are too.”

It’s a different model to the one that began as an instinctive reaction to Melbourne’s first lockdown in March 2020 when Delia started delivering his own food to bypass the existing platforms. It rapidly morphed to delivering food for others from his network of chef/restaurateur mates.

The decisive moment was to abandon what he calls “I’m hungry, deliver it now” food and focus on carefully conceived meals the consumer needs, with instruction to finish in their own kitchens.

It’s bloomed from there. And has taken the chef behind the SBS series Spice Journey from the kitchen to the boardroom.

Almost. Providoor employs 14 full-timers with 12 more casuals in customer service.

His three restaurants and airport cafe are a separate business, and remain closed, but in Sydney, demand has dropped as restaurants reopen. He believes it’s temporary.

“We anticipated that for the first few weeks,” he says “but we’ve seen a spike in demand for big occasion stuff at home, 10-people parties, so you know, swings and roundabouts.”