Create a food delivery API for any food delivery app/service

So why create a food delivery API?

Couldn't you simply use an API provided by top food delivery apps like Grubhub, Eat24, Seamless or UberEats?

Well it's not that simple.

To begin with, there is no standard API format that all delivery platforms adhere to. And sadly, almost none of the food delivery platforms provide a public API – your best bet is to pay to get access.

Even if you conceived of a product that could revolutionise food delivery or restaurant management you'd be stuck without access to an unified open food delivery API.

But what if there was a work around?

In this post we show you how Nanonets can help you create a food delivery API of sorts by extracting data from delivery emails.

Use cases for a food delivery API

A food delivery API can be used to power various services, here are a few examples:

1. Provide data analytics and insights to restaurants so that they can pick up trends on order types, popular foods, client demographics etc. Food delivery apps typically don't share such insights.
2. Optimise or manage a delivery fleet that takes on orders from multiple restaurants or food delivery apps.
3. Power cloud kitchens that could scale a restaurant's reach.
4. Build an integrated platform for restaurants to receive and handle orders across delivery platforms.
5. Allow dark stores or fulfilment centres to predict demand and supply groceries to restaurants on time.
6. Extract phone numbers or contact details from delivery emails.

Using Nanonets to create a custom food delivery API

Nanonets is an AI-based OCR software that automates all kinds of data transformation workflows.

Nanonets can recognise and extract data from emails, email attachments, PDFs, images, documents, spreadsheets, and other kinds of data sources. The extracted data can then be sent or integrated into any business application of your choice.

To create your own food delivery API, you'll create a custom email parser with Nanonets to scan all food delivery emails.

This food delivery email extractor will extract specific data from delivery emails sent by various apps (Grubhub, Eat24, Seamless or UberEats). And this data can be used to power your API.

Create your own food delivery API with Nanonets. Parse food delivery emails and automate you workflows.

How to parse food delivery emails with Nanonets

Follow these steps to build your own food delivery email parser and send the data anywhere you like:

Create an account

Sign up to get started with Nanonets.

Or sign in to your Nanonets account.

Select a data parser

Depending on the types of emails you want to parse data from, create your own data parser or select one of Nanonets' pre-built data parsers.

A pre-built data parser is an AI that has been trained on thousands of examples of a particular data/document type.

Import your emails

Next, import a few emails into your data parser.

Simply auto-forward your emails to a dedicated Nanonets inbox or receiving address. And Nanonets will then capture all these emails into your data parser.

You could also set up an automatic import of files from cloud storage, databases or connect to other sources via an API.

Extract data from your emails

Nanonet's pre-built data parser extracts relevant data from the email body and/or attachment in the forwarded emails.

You can even quickly edit, review or approve the extracted data.

Export or automate workflow

Complete the process by selecting your preferred output format - Excel or csv (among other options).

You can also automate this entire workflow by specifying data enhancements/transformations, setting up approvals, and sending the final results to any business application of your choice.

Take away

It sucks that there is no unified API that can work across food delivery apps.

But you can still power your own food delivery API with an intelligent data parser like Nanonets coupled with some integrations.

Nanonets can achieve this by extracting data from delivery emails. The Nanonets email parser can be used to extract info from all kinds of emails - e.g. exporting Outlook emails to Excel or extracting data from email attachments.