Illustration by Chris Danger
“You picked a hell of a day to ride along,” Mati McCann texts me. With heavy flakes of snow coming down outside of Lamplighter Coffee Roasters on Addison, I can’t help but agree. She rides up on a well-loved fixed-gear bike, a neon-pink helmet atop her head. As a bike courier for Quickness RVA, McCann is accustomed to pedaling through every kind of weather. Quickness, which has been delivering food in Richmond since 2010, employs seasoned bikers like McCann who bring a personal touch to the increasingly digitized world of food delivery.
At a time when app-based online delivery services (UberEats, Grubhub, EatStreet and, more recently, ChopChop and DoorDash) are crowding the marketplace, established businesses like Quickness are being forced to adapt to the changing times. According to a recent study from investment firm Cowen, analysts predict a 79 percent increase in the U.S. food delivery market by 2022. Currently, online orders account for almost half of all delivery business.
The Pre-App World
Quickness RVA, founded in 2010 by Frank Bucalo, made a name for itself before the age of online ordering. They are quintessentially Richmond — their trademark gear-shaped logo can be seen on bikers throughout the city. Bucalo, who had been a bike courier in New York before coming to Richmond, saw a niche for a bike delivery service. He spent the first year hanging out at Strange Matter near VCU, on hand to deliver orders to hungry customers. Soon, more restaurants engaged his services, with Quickness growing to deliver for over 40 restaurants throughout the city. In addition to food delivery, they also ferry anything from flowers to hot cups of coffee.
In April 2016, Bucalo and his team launched an online ordering platform from their website. According to General Manager Jess Izen, they began developing it after Zoomer (a now-defunct online ordering site) came to town. “The writing on the wall was that if you can’t handle taking online orders, you are going to lose relevance to restaurants that want to be on a platform,” Izen says. “The ones we had long-term relationships with needed something that they could afford.” Services like GrubHub and UberEats often charge restaurants a fee of 10 to 30 percent of food sales while also making customers pay for delivery. By keeping overhead costs low, Quickness aims to offer lower rates, while also paying their riders a living wage.
The Personal Touch
One of the differences bet-ween Quickness and larger third-party sites like UberEats, according to Izen, is the personal touch: “They come in, they have a salesperson that does a wave of sales, then they hire people to try to keep up with the sales. It’s very different than just building relationships with restaurants slowly.
“We have a lot of riders that are already working in restaurants or that have friends working in restaurants,” Izen says. “We’re very much a working-class company, so a lot of the time there’s already an introduction waiting.”
Snowy Ride
If my time with Mati McCann taught me anything, it is that Quickness RVA’s riders are pros at what they do — even in rain, sleet or snow. After grabbing a cup of coffee to warm up, McCann checks her phone. She loads and re-loads an app called Twinjet, which Quickness uses to disseminate orders to riders stationed throughout the city. As lunch approaches, we hop on our bikes and head down Floyd Avenue toward VCU. I can barely keep up, sweating as snow falls silently on the pavement. We accept an order from Asado and head toward Broad Street. As traffic becomes congested, McCann and I pedal on through. We’re there in mere moments, no parking required. Before I know it, the food is packed tightly in her bag, and we are riding again. We deliver to a nearby church before signing on to pick up three more orders a couple blocks down at Café Ole. Unlike me, McCann is hardly fazed by the cold, recognizing that, in true Quickness fashion, the best way to stay warm is to keep moving.
