Radish Cooperative reduces food waste, improves service for customers and business for restaurants with Azure

Disrupting food delivery

Sometimes the best ideas are the oldest ideas. Take Radish Cooperative as an example. The food delivery group has managed to blend two tried-and-true practices, food delivery and cooperative business, into something entirely new. 

Radish is food delivery done right. Its restaurants, couriers, and customers are all members, which means everyone has an added stake in ensuring quality and efficiency. By putting the community that it serves first, Radish is bringing faster, fresher food back to digital deliveries, and it’s getting this done with Microsoft Azure.

A platform where plates are paramount

For years, restaurants got food to their customers promptly and with minimal to no fees using their own care and expertise. Mansib Rahman, Radish Cooperative’s Chief Executive Officer, knows this firsthand, having worked in the industry for much of his life. “Somehow, the industry went from staff drivers delivering food quickly and directly to customers to where we are today, where deliveries take longer, costs are through the roof, and quality has declined.” 

Believing that technology ought to make things better and not worse, Radish set out to bring back to deliveries the same care and attention to detail that restaurants give to their food—while harnessing the best delivery platform innovations of the past few years. To do so, Radish took a cooperative approach, knowing that providing a truly viable market alternative demanded a different kind of offering. By launching as a co-op, Radish could better incentivize restaurants, couriers, and customers to join by providing greater control as decision-makers and greater rewards as shareholders. The co-op model also helped ensure that it could hire its couriers as employees, training and compensating them fairly to raise the quality and efficiency of deliveries.  

“Our desire was to combine the hospitality-centric vision of food delivery with the technology benefits of single-platform ordering and the collective control and shared value of a cooperative,” Rahman says. “We wanted to make a platform that would be efficient, economically advantageous, and respectful of the restaurants, couriers, and customers it served.” 

Launching just before the pandemic, Radish has been in operation across the city of Montreal for a few years now. It currently delivers food from more than 140 restaurants and local shops, with a weekly marketplace grocery service as well. Rahman and his team designed and developed the Radish cloud-native, vertically integrated platform internally, building it to run on Azure services. The platform handles multiple workloads like invoicing, restaurant payment, and algorithmic courier dispatching, and it’s supported by a Docker-based containerized architecture. Radish relies on the following Azure services to help run its platform: 

• GitHub and Azure to host and connect its developer environment
• Azure Application Gateway to route requests
• Azure App Service to create and deploy applications
• Azure Container Registry to manage container images and artifacts
• Azure Notification Hubs to send push notifications
• Azure Content Delivery Network to serve assets
• Azure Cache for Redis to facilitate fast caching
• Azure Blob Storage to store logs and other assets

Radish is taking advantage of both the scale and resilience gained through running on Azure. Rahman states, “With Azure, we’ve been able to scale and adapt to our co-op members' needs very quickly. And because of the versatility of the platform with offerings such Azure Load Balancer and Application Gateway, we can ensure that their businesses face no downtime during the sacred Friday night dinner rush.”

Speed and flexibility also help Rahman adapt Radish to keep pace with fast-changing industry trends and the co-op’s new ideas. For instance, the co-op decided to offer student discounts. This meant adding a new module to verify student identifications to facilitate the discounts. Radish used Custom Vision, part of Azure Cognitive Services, to quickly and easily spin up a solution capable of scanning and validating identification cards. That spared the co-op from spending serious time and effort developing and training its own AI computer visioning model. Similarly, Radish needed a means of sending order notifications to its member restaurants, and by using Azure services, it spun up a notification hub almost instantly. Rahman says, “Every step of the way, we find something in Azure that helps us solve a major challenge or pain point. Microsoft has already thought through these problems, so we can just tap into the solution.”

A serious head start as a startup

Rahman credits the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub program as one of the secrets to Radish’s success. Through program membership, Radish received Azure credits to offset costs and gained access to development tools and Azure OpenAI Service to help drive innovation. The co-op also benefitted from expert business and technology guidance. Rahman shares, “The Founders Hub has been instrumental in our success—from the Azure credits to help us launch to the mentorship and guidance to the extension of Microsoft 365 licenses that really help offset monthly costs.” 

Participation in the Founders Hub program has meant more than technology access, industry leadership, and funding offsets. For Radish, it also means working with a company that understands and complements its environmental and social governance practices. The co-op is enabling more efficient and environmentally friendly food delivery via electric cargo bikes, paying living wages, supporting local businesses, and, through increased data analysis and predictive algorithms, reducing food waste. It’s important to Radish that Microsoft shares its vision. Rahman states, “We appreciate working with a company that actually provides the resources needed to make real, lasting change.”

Founders Hub membership led Radish to the Microsoft Entrepreneurship for Positive Impact program, which connects the co-op to other startups aligned with the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Additional opportunities, like special events and dedicated mentors, will continue to benefit Radish as it grows.

Serving up member support

Making meaningful change is what Radish is all about, and for the co-op, that starts at home with its members. Radish is looking to bring more integrated services to its platform to provide greater value for its restaurants. The co-op plans to provide advanced analytical services for its members, based on their integrated data, to help them improve areas like marketing, HR, accounting, and ordering. “Other fields use big data, analytics, and machine learning, and we want to bring those advantages to our restaurants who might not have that knowledge or capability,” says Rahman. “With Azure, our delivery platform is fully integrated, so we can take our restaurants’ data and add value for things like sales and inventory management.”

Using that integrated data analysis, Radish can help its members offset supply challenges—like helping one restaurant shift a surplus of flour or vegetables to another in need—which not only helps bottom lines but actively reduces food waste. “With our platform on Azure, we’re seeing real potential for food waste reduction and making the case for cooperative networks where all the actors are collaborating with each other,” says Rahman.

The idea that there is strength in numbers is borne out by the fact that Radish members have survived the economic turbulence of the past few years. “The pandemic affected a lot of restaurants in the region,” Rahman observes. “But a good proportion of our restaurants survived because by working with us, they were plugged into our network. We were able to help with things like government assistance grants and making special deliveries to increase survivability.”

As for now, Radish is pleased to be helping its restaurants get their food out to customers fresher and faster. “We’re highly efficient, making three or four deliveries per hour and upwards of seven or eight if our couriers are on bikes, which is having a huge impact economically and environmentally. Our couriers earn more money and waste less gas because of the dispatching technology we’ve integrated into the platform we built on Azure. It’s amazing!” Rahman concludes.

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