Consider this scenario: you have just started a restaurant business in a highly competitive market. So you are focusing on building a strong brand. You want to achieve that partly by standing out in your food deliveries.
Now, when it comes to food delivery, customers already expect excellent service in terms of things such as timeliness. You realize that it would be hard for you to improve so much on these ‘conventional’ aspects of delivery so as to be known for it. So you are looking for alternatives.
Many such alternatives can be found by looking at recent inventions in this area.
So I did exactly this for this particular scenario. Let’s see what I found.
The first patent that caught my attention was titled Tamper Evident Bag. It says:
[. . .] it is beneficial to provide customers with the confidence that the ordered meals have not been touched or tampered with during delivery, for example, by a delivery driver. To provide such confidence to customers, the customers need to know if the bag is subsequently opened after the food is placed in the bag at the restaurant.
Customers obviously care about the integrity of the food they are getting. This patent describes an ingenious cardboard box. Once closed, it cannot be opened without clearly showing signs of tempering on it.
The patent’s drawings don’t do a great job of explaining how it works, so I found another GIF from the company Guarantab, which also manufactures such boxes (albeit different design):
Let’s see what else popped up in my quick search.
Another invention that caught my attention was System and method for grading and scoring food which says:
A daily caloric budget (e.g., 2,000 calorie/day) can be considered as the budget to be spent on shipping of nutrients to the body. If the caloric budget is spent on junk food with little to no nutrition value (e.g. only empty boxes are being delivered), then the caloric cost does not justify the delivery.
I could relate to it. When I order food from local restaurants, I keep wondering about their calorie content. None of my local restaurants mention these values about the food they deliver.
Now imagine that you begin to do exactly this – pasting a slip on every delivery box that states how many calories are there in the box. This can make you popular among your health-centric customers.
The next invention which I found interesting was Reduced Material Packaging which evidently can help promote your restaurant as a ‘green thinking’ business.
This next idea I came across was at another level. An inventor came up with a way of repurposing pizza delivery boxes as game boards.
99% of the time we are doing linear thinking. Our brains are designed to do this. With the right training and tools, however, we are all capable creative thinking.
If you want train your mind to be more creative at problem solving, do subscribe to our free newsletter:
