Cantidio Ribeiro, a University of New Brunswick student, said food delivery apps are dangerous. Ribeiro is an international student from Brazil who tries to minimize his usage of food delivery apps because of its financial impact.
According to Ribeiro, about 20 per cent of his paycheque used to go towards ordering food from apps such as DoorDash.
“You get used to them and you end up spending way more money than you should,” he said.
The idea of spending more than you should when ordering food through a delivery app is one thing Logan MacGillivray wanted to change when he founded Kangaroo, a food delivery app focused on students.
MacGillivray is a fourth-year student at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. He created Kangaroo after identifying some problems he, as a student, had with food delivery apps. These issues included not having the money to order food and the lack of apps in his university’s town.
“I wanted to create a service that could work in a university town, be focused on students and most importantly be affordable,” said MacGillivray.
The app is originally from Nova Scotia but was launched in Fredericton on Oct. 7. It contains a fixed delivery fee for all restaurants and a no-delivery-fee menu called “flat menu,” which has select items from the app’s restaurants that can be delivered at no charge.
MacGillivray said such measures were created because of the number of students who struggle to afford delivery fees.
“There’s that classic meme of ‘you spend 20 bucks on food delivery and your total is 100 dollars’ or something. With us, we just have one fixed price, so you know it’s super transparent,” said MacGillivray.
“You know when you go to your checkout what you’re really spending and if you take from the flat menu, you’re not spending anything on delivery.”
Emily Campbell, a second-year student at St. Thomas University, worries about the priciness of delivery apps, but also worries about the compensation and fairness to the app’s drivers.
“I do hope that their drivers get paid enough and get more tips because it’s a hard
job to go and take all these orders,” said Campbell.
This is an issue MacGillivray said Kangaroo also focuses on. He said Kangaroo guarantees their couriers a minimum of $15 per hour.
“That is before any of the tips come in,” he said.
MacGillivray said Kangaroo was designed to be fair to all its stakeholders while solving university students’ problems with food delivery apps.
Some of the restaurants Kangaroo partnered with in Fredericton include Longer Restaurant, RustiCo, The Abbey Café & Gallery, Naru Sushi and Caribbean Flavas.
MacGillivray said expanding to Fredericton was a way for the company to step outside of their comfort zone since unlike other towns where Kangaroo operates, Fredericton already has DoorDash and SkipTheDishes.
“I knew a lot of people at UNB who said that this was a service that they would want, St. Thomas as well, and we just wanted to push our comfort zones,” he said.
Although Fredericton has many options for food delivery apps, students like Campbell and Ribeiro said they are willing to try new ones.
Campbell said she only has SkipTheDishes downloaded on her phone because one of her friends recommended it to her.
“I would definitely be open to trying other apps, this is just the only one I’ve ever had my friends tell me about, so I wasn’t familiar with anything else,” Campbell said.
“But I definitely would be open to trying other ones.”
