TRY CARRIAGE
The app dedicated to hassle-free food deliveries
By bazaar staff
With food concepts on the rise, arranging for deliveries has become increasingly problematic for restaurant owners. Having opened up The Stack, a burger concept in Kuwait City, Abdullah Al Mutawa decided to do something about it. “When I wanted to start offering a delivery service for The Stack, I realized what a hassle it was. This, in addition to the commission from the delivery platform I was on, the assets that were bought and the workers that were hired - made the delivery process extremely cost prohibitive. It was then that I got the idea for a food delivery platform that had a logistics component. One that would free restaurants from the hassle and be profitable,” he explained. Enter Carriage, the brainchild of Abdullah and his co-founders: Khaled Al-Qabandi, Musab Al-Mutawa and Jonathan Lau. Offering restaurants all the benefits of delivering orders to customers without the challenges of arranging deliveries, Carriage arrives as a solution to both diners and restaurant owners alike. While Carriage offers a delivery service for anyone that requires it, Abdullah and his team hand pick the restaurants they choose to sign with. “We’re not trying to limit ourselves, we’re being selective. We only want the best there is for our customers,” he explained. Quality is Carriage’s biggest concern – and their promise is to deliver the food in the best quality possible. “We’ve promised restaurants and customers that their food would arrive in a quality that is as close as possible to the expected experience of in-house dining,” Abdullah explained. “The number of re-orders from our customers indicates that we are fulfilling that promise.” The fun part of the Carriage experience is that you can track your order in real-time! All you have to do is select the area you’re in, find your favorite restaurant and place your order. Once it’s confirmed, you can then track the driver on the map – gone are the days of guessing how long the food is going to be! Reeling with excitement and so many questions, we sat down with CEO Abdullah Al Mutawa to learn more about this service. 38
CEO Abdullah Al Mutawa
Why the name Carriage? And are you using the word “try” in ‘Try Carriage’ to encourage people to “try it out?” Carriages were designed specifically for private passengers, connoted comfort and elegance. These are all things we strive for when delivering to our customers. We want them to have the comfort of delivery from the best and highest-quality restaurants in Kuwait, in a way that is individualized. And yes, we did want to encourage people to “try” Carriage out. We loved the idea of having a call to action within our name. What was the gap you saw in the market, and how does Carriage fill that gap? Well, there are different gaps that we’re trying to fill. First is competition. There is virtually no competition when it comes to online food delivery in Kuwait- and that has resulted in food delivery platforms that lack quality and speed. We believe there is room for our delivery platform because we provide a caliber of speed and restaurants that heretofore had not existed. Additionally, we make the delivery of everyone’s
favorite food so intuitive, easy, and enjoyable that people get hooked instantaneously. What separates Carriage from other food delivery services? Do you only deliver from restaurants that don’t have a delivery service or do you deliver from everyone to everywhere? The short answer- we provide both customers and restaurants with a substantially better experience. The longer version of this answer is that Carriage has a completely different business model than any other online platform in Kuwait. We provide an integrated service where we provide not only the platform that customers can order from, but we also take care of the logistics from the restaurants side. This provides us with the ability to have the fastest possible deliveries in Kuwait. In fact, we currently average a little less than 33 minutes per delivery and are hoping to decrease that within the next couple of weeks. We are also able to offer unique features such as the ability to track your order through Carriage’s app something that some purport to do but do not. We’re also recruiting restaurants that are of