Making daily dinner easy with Deliveroo meals and Amazon Rekognition

When Software Engineer Florian Thomas describes Deliveroo, he is talking about a rapidly growing, highly in-demand company. Everyone must eat, after all, and Deliveroo is, in his words, “on a mission to transform the way you order food.”  Specifically, Deliveroo’s business is partnering with restaurants to bring customers their favorite eats, right to their doorsteps.

Deliveroo started in 2013 when Will Shu, the company’s founder and CEO, moved to London. He discovered a city full of great restaurants, but to his dismay, few of them delivered food. He made it his personal mission to bring the best local restaurants directly to people’s doors. Now, Deliveroo’s team is 2,000 strong and operates across not only the UK but also in 13 other global markets, including Australia, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, and most of Europe.

As they’ve grown, Deliveroo has always kept customers at the center. Delivering their chosen meals in a convenient and timely way is not all that Deliveroo has to offer, though. They’re equally timely, responsive, and creative if something has gone awry with a customer’s order (such as a spilled item). Their service portal allows customers to share an image-based report of the issue.

“We’ve learned that, when things go wrong, customers don’t just want to tell us, they want to show us,” remarked Thomas. In addition to enabling the customer care team to provide a solution for each customer, these images are shared with Deliveroo’s restaurant partners to help them continue to improve customers’ experiences.

What Thomas and his team soon realized, though, was that not all of the images that customers uploaded were appropriate. To protect the customer care team from having to sift through any inappropriate images, Deliveroo uses Amazon Rekognition. This easy-to-use content moderation solution has become integral to Deliveroo’s customer care flow, as hundreds of photos per week (about 1.7% of all images submitted) are rejected.

“With Amazon Rekognition, we’re able to quickly and accurately process all those photos in real time, which helps us serve our customers promptly when real issues have arisen. That also lets us free our agents’ time so they can focus on the customer problems that matter,” Thomas explained. “Amazon Rekognition allows our agents to safely respond to important customer issues in a timely manner and ensures that legitimate customer claims are handled automatically.”

The choice to use Amazon Rekognition was a natural one for Deliveroo, as the company has been using AWS for a long time. The team originally selected AWS because of their trust in the service. Now, they use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store the photos that go into the customer service queue, which streamlines their flow into analysis with Amazon Rekognition. This flow is pictured in the diagram. In addition, the Deliveroo customer care team is using Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda to achieve resolutions faster, as well as Amazon Aurora to manage customer issues.

Going forward, Deliveroo’s customer care team plans to use additional AWS machine learning services, such as Amazon Comprehend, to personalize the post-order care experience for each Deliveroo customer. “We’re hungry for what’s next,” Thomas said laughingly.

About the Author

Marisa Messina is on the AWS ML marketing team, where her job includes identifying the most innovative AWS-using customers and showcasing their inspiring stories. Prior to AWS, she worked on consumer-facing hardware and then university-facing cloud offerings at Microsoft. Outside of work, she enjoys exploring the Pacific Northwest hiking trails, cooking without recipes, and dancing in the rain.