History of Food Delivery

This fortnight, we thought that we should unpack the history of food delivery across the world. So, throughout this episode, we will discuss the first meal delivery provided to the King and Queen of Italy in 1889, followed by the first official meal delivery service started in India in 1890, Chinese meal delivery in America during the 1920s, WWII delivery services, the first Meals on Wheels service in London in 1954, and finally, Pizza Hut’s Pizzanet which was the world’s first online meal delivery service in 1994.  We hope you enjoy listening! 

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Transcript

Hi everyone! Welcome to our latest episode! We hope that you’re enjoying this new format so far and have gotten something out of our episodes! We really appreciate all of our listeners and want to be as collaborative as possible within this podcast, so if you have any feedback about the content or format of the episodes, or if you have any suggestions on episode topics, we would love to hear from you! You can contact us at ella@mealsonwheelssa.org.au. The contact information is also in the description of each episode. 

This fortnight, we thought that we should unpack the history of food delivery across the world. As you probably know or can guess, food delivery is the basis of what Meals on Wheels is, and although our services have expanded over the past few years, food delivery will always be the most important service that we provide to the South Australian community. Meals on Wheels is an international organisation has also played a significant role in food delivery becoming as prolific as it is now, and so we feel that this episode is a necessary one to do. So, throughout this episode, we will discuss the first meal delivery provided to the King and Queen of Italy in 1889, followed by the first official meal delivery service started in India in 1890, Chinese meal delivery in America during the 1920s, WWII delivery services, the first Meals on Wheels service in London in 1954, Pizza Hut’s Pizzanet, and finally, the world’s first online meal delivery service in 1995. 

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As you may have guessed when we said the words Italy and food, this meal delivery involved a pizza. While the concept of pizza delivery seems like a pretty regular occurrence now, this first delivery was a product of politics, the unification of Italy, and the disparity of available foods between nobility and the poor, something that we became very familiar with since last month’s full-length episode on food eaten throughout the centuries. It is important to note that Italy had unified into one kingdom only a few decades before this event, and this unification helped to spread foods originally confined to small towns across the nation, resulting in our current conception of traditional Italian foods such as cannoli, pasta, pizza, and lasagne, to name a few. However, for some reason that we don’t really know, pizza had not extended far beyond Naples at the time that the Italian King and Queen visited the city in 1889. 

In 1878, Queen Margherita became the first queen of a united Italy and married her first cousin, Umberto. As the first royal couple of the newly unified Italy, their main role was to prevent revolution from taking over the fragile new nation. One aspect of this role often involved travelling across Italy to gain the support of citizens and boost morale, and this is what they were hoping to do when they reached Naples in 1889. According to the story, Queen Margherita had become bored of the fancy meals provided to the nobility, and so requested a meal that would usually been eaten by a commoner. 

So, Naples most famous pizza chef, a man named Raffaele Esposito, was called in to create a pizza for the Queen. Probably very nervous to create a new food for the queen of Italy, Esposito and his wife created three different types of pizzas. Very importantly, one of these pizzas was modelled after the Italian flag, with red tomatoes, white mozzarella, and green basil. Once the pizzas had finished cooking, Esposito ran them over to the queen in the first meal delivery in history. Luckily for Esposito, when the Queen took a bite of the pizza, she declared that it was one of the best foods that she had ever eaten. 

A few days later, Esposito received a letter from the Head of Table Service of the Royals' Household which read, "Most Esteemed Raffaele Esposito, I confirm to you that the three kinds of pizza you prepared for Her Majesty were found to be delicious." Grateful for this recognition, Esposito named the mozzarella, basil, tomato pizza after the Queen herself, creating what is now the most famous type of pizza, the Pizza Margherita.

Il piu stimato Raffaele Esposito, io confermo a te che le tre tipe di pizze che hai preperato per Sua Mestra e stato trovato di essere deliciozo 

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While we have Queen Margherita to thank for the first meal delivery, the first actual ongoing official meal delivery service began only one year later in India. During the 1800s, while India was still under British occupation, India experienced mass urbanisation of workers. Many of these workers moved to Mumbai, where they would often work long hours without a break to go out and get themselves lunch. This led to the creation of the Mumbai Dabbawallas, which translates in English to ‘the one who carries a box’, and who are still delivering meals across Mumbai today. According to the official Mumbai Dabbawalla website, “about 125 years back, a Parsi banker wanted to have home cooked food in office and gave this responsibility to the first ever Dabbawalla. Many people liked the idea and the demand for Dabba delivery soared. It was all informal and individual effort in the beginning, but visionary Mahadeo Havaji Bachche saw the opportunity and started the lunch delivery service in its present team-delivery format with 100 Dabbawallas.” 

As we previously said, the Mumbai Dabbawallas are still in operation today, with around 5,000 people delivering meals to over 200,000 customers per day. This success is due to their unique system of delivery. A dabbawalla will either walk or bike to the customers house between 9-10 in the morning to collect the home cooked meals. They will then take the meals, which are stored in stacked tin containers, to a local sorting place, where they are grouped according to the train line that takes them to the area of the city that they need to go. Each lunchbox has a distinct code, consisting of a combination of the alphabet, colours, and numbers, that identifies the destination and recipient of each box. The lunch boxes are then carried, usually overhead, by train, bicycle, or foot until they get to the area of the city that they need to be in. Once there, the boxes are sorted again based on building address and floor number. Another set of dabbawallas now take over and transport the lunch boxes to the workplaces of the appropriate customers. Then, once lunch is over, more dabbawallas come to pick up the lunchboxes from the workplace and the process is reversed, ending back at the customers homes ready for the next day. 

 This efficiency has allowed the Mumbai Dabbawallas to experience a 5-6% increase in customers each year, despite the increase in online-based meal delivery services. The Mumbai Dabbawallas also have an incredible error ratio of 1 in 16 million, meaning only one meal in every 16 million meals that they provide has a mistake. This organisation is definitely one that is looked at as a leader in customer satisfaction and delivery efficiency across the world.  

Talk about how this organisation has been looked at as an ideal within training at MoWSA

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The next era of food delivery services that comes up as a significant era of progress is the phenomenon of Chinese food delivery in the US during the 1920s. It is important to acknowledge that while this was the first popular delivery food, African American families often sold take-away meals as this was one of the only available ways to support themselves and their families during the Jim Crow laws. 

So, the earliest known reference to delivery services by Chinese restaurants comes from a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles in 1922. In 1922, Kin-Chu café proclaimed that it was “the only place on the West Coast making and delivering real Chinese food” and would “deliver hot dishes direct to you.” This rise in popularity also saw Chinese foods become altered into what is now referred to as ‘American Chinese cuisine’. An example of this alteration of Chinese food is Chop suey, which consists of meat, such as chicken, pork, or beef, cooked quickly with vegetables, usually bean sprouts, cabbage, and celery. It is usually served with rice but can also be served with stir-fried noodles. While it is believed that this meal was created in America, it is not verified. One account claims that the dish was invented by Chinese American cooks working on the transcontinental railroad sometime during the 19th century. Another story is that it was created during the premier of the Qing Dynasty, Li Hongzhang's visit to the United States in 1896 by his chef, who tried to create a meal suitable for both Chinese and American palates. Another story is that the premier wandered to a local Chinese restaurant after the hotel kitchen had closed, where the chef, embarrassed that he had nothing ready to offer, came up with the new dish using scraps of leftovers. 

However, while this interest in Americanised Chinese takeaway food was very popular, it was soon overshadowed by the great depression in 1929, which saw a dramatic decrease in the US population’s ability to pay for food deliveries. It also suffered more setbacks following World War II when it became less popular due to not being ‘authentic’ enough. 

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 It was during WWII that Meals on Wheels enters the conversation around food delivery. During the Blitz in London, the Women’s Volunteer Service began to provide hot meals to citizens whose homes had been destroyed. According to their website, “Royal Voluntary Service is one of Britain’s largest volunteering organisations providing vital, responsive services which support public health, social care and wellbeing. Our volunteers support the NHS and people in need, with the aim of building resilience in local communities.”

The first organised meal delivery by the Women’s Volunteer Service, following the London deliveries, was in Hemel Hampstead in 1943. The earliest deliveries adapted old prams to transport the food easily and quickly around the community, using straw bales or even felt hats to keep the meals warm as they rushed between homes. We aren’t going to discuss this subject for too long this episode, because we have planned a whole episode on how MoW started in London during this time and how it has progressed since, that we are going to release next month. 

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The last period of time that we wanted to discuss is something that most of you probably haven’t heard of. While we didn’t want to discuss too much about online food delivery services such as Uber, because we all know about that now and it isn’t very interesting to listen to, we found this bit of online food service history really interesting while we were researching for this episode and wanted to mention it to tie up the end of the episode. 

 In 1994, Pizza hut launched one of the very first online meal delivery websites ever, which they called Pizzanet. Pizza hut, if any of our listeners don’t know, is an American based restaurant chain that sells pizza. The chain is international but dine in service isn’t available in SA since a couple months ago. I’m pretty sure that you can still order it online in South Australia though. 

Anyways, back to Pizzanet. So, the website didn’t work across all countries that Pizza hut is in service, or even across the US, but was only available in Santa Cruz, California. Even so, this website was one of the first public sites ever created on the internet, which started on the first day of 1983 if you were wondering, and provided an early model of online food delivery services that have been used by the big corporations that we are now so familiar with.