Food Delivery Apps: Which One Deserves Your Money?

Written by Alex Fisher

Thumbnail & Banner Photo by Social Cut on Unsplash

It’s late at night, and you’re working on a huge paper worth half your grade for a specific course. It’s due in two days but you’re barely half finished, and you really want to avoid a late penalty. Then, suddenly, your stomach grumbles, making you realize exactly how hungry you are—and distracting you from the work you need to get it done. Dockside is closed, or you don’t want to make a ruckus in the kitchen and wake up your family or roommates, and none of the snacks in your cupboard seem appealing to you right now. What can you do?

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Food delivery apps provide one possible solution to this situation, offering a convenient way to get hot food delivered straight to you without having to make a bunch of noise cooking and doing dishes or having to rely on meal hall hours. The question is though, with so many different delivery apps, which one should you actually be spending your money on?

Throughout this article we’ll be talking about the pros and cons of four different food delivery apps: Skip the Dishes, DoorDash, UberEats, and HeyChef. Each has something different to offer, and any one of them might be right for you.

UberEats

Arguably the most recognizable name, being connected to the ride sharing brand, UberEats is the first food delivery app that we’ll be looking at. With the smallest selection of the three major delivery services, the UberEats homepage is dominated by the top selling restaurants in Halifax and the restaurants currently offering special promotions—most commonly zero dollar delivery fees for certain amounts spent, and buy-one-get-one promotions. The selection on UberEats is mainly comprised of fast food (McDonald’s, KFC, Dairy Queen, etc.) with a number of options for South and East Asian restaurants and a handful of Western restaurants. There are also a couple of grocery stores and convenience stores available, so if you need something from Walmart or Dollarama, then UberEats has you covered.

The Uber One subscription is available for avid users of Uber’s services, which for $9.99 per month (plus tax) offers perks for both the food delivery and ride sharing apps. Notably for UberEats, this subscription offers zero dollar delivery fees and 5% discounts on eligible orders. However, if you also find yourself using ride shares often, that certainly adds to the value of this subscription.

Skip the Dishes

Skip the Dishes is notable for a couple of reasons. First, it is the only major food delivery app to be based out of Canada, with the company’s headquarters being in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Second—and likely more important to the average person—is the fact that, as of the writing of this article, Skip doesn’t have any form of subscription service. They do have a rewards service, which they call SkipRewards, but it is based on points earned for money spent on the app, and there is no associated monthly fee. While there are two tiers to SkipRewards, these tiers are based on the number of orders made per month, with a mere minimum of two orders per month being necessary for the second tier. While the first tier offers the standard discounts and rewards, the second tier grants better, personalized offers and special discounts.

As far as selection goes, Skip has the largest and most varied available of all the options. A huge variety of restaurants are available for delivery through Skip, of just about any cuisine a person might be interested in. From Canadian to Korean to Greek, if there’s a type of food you want, it’s almost assuredly available on Skip—even if not every restaurant is. Unfortunately, the home page of Skip is rather plain and limited. After entering an address, there is only a trending tab and a popular restaurants tab before a long list of restaurants with very few details. When it comes to discovering new restaurants, Skip the Dishes is definitely the worst of the three options.

DoorDash

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DoorDash is the third of the big three options for food delivery. It falls more in line with UberEats than Skip the Dishes, offering a paid subscription of $9.99 per month for free delivery and reduced fees on eligible orders of at least fifteen dollars. Recently, DoorDash has also rolled out a points system for select restaurants, though these points are based on a per-store basis and do not transfer between different restaurants. On the homepage of DoorDash can be found a number of recommended categories, ranging from personalized recommendations to recent deals and trending restaurants.

Overall, the selection on Doordash is quite good, nearly on the level of Skip the Dishes. Most restaurants in the Halifax and Dartmouth region can be found on DoorDash if they’re not on Skip (though many can be found on both). The downside of DoorDash is that it tends to be slightly more expensive than the other two options. While the overall fees are comparable between all three, DoorDash really pushes its subscription service, and tends to be more expensive as a result—offering fewer chances to get free shipping or reduced costs as an incentive to pay the monthly fee.

HeyChef

The final major option for ordering food late at night—and one that’s exclusive to Saint Mary’s students—is HeyChef. A much smaller service, this one operates quite differently from the others. Registration is still required, but in addition codes for specific service locations must be used to add those locations to the app. Saint Mary’s added HeyChef to its food options last year with code "HUSKY," serving food late at night out of the Dockside dining hall for those students who might be staying up late or who missed dinner for one reason or another.

There are a few respects in which HeyChef falls short of the other food delivery services. It is not a discovery service, meaning that specific locations have to be added through codes in order to be available to order from them. Therefore, on the HeyChef app, the only option available for Saint Mary’s students to order late night food is Dockside’s own Late Night service. The options for this are quite limited, with only a handful of pizzas, pitas, burgers, fries, poutines, and drinks. While this is more than suitable for the occasional late-night snack, someone who regularly orders food late at night will quickly get tired of the limited options on HeyChef.

HeyChef does offer a number of significant advantages over the other services. No delivery or service fees make it significantly cheaper than any of the other food delivery options. Being located on campus, it is also much quicker and more reliable than the other services. Oftentimes, it is only a ten to fifteen minute wait for an order, as opposed to a half hour or more through the other services. One more option for students is to connect their student cards to their HeyChef account, allowing them to use their Flex Dollars (which, if you’re unaware, all students with a meal plan have some amount of Flex Dollars) and save their own money (at least until those precious Flex Dollars run out). With no drivers, there’s also no need to tip through HeyChef, either, further saving money. The only downsides—besides the extremely limited food options—is that HeyChef has no option for a rewards program, and the Dockside Late Night service is only open five days per week, being closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Overall though, for any students in need of a quick meal late at night, ordering Dockside through HeyChef is an excellent option.

Overall, there is no definitively ‘best’ option for food delivery services: each has its own perks and downsides. A favourite restaurant might be available on one service but not another, and the benefits of one might outweigh those of the others for a specific person. The big three food delivery apps—Skip the Dishes, DoorDash, and UberEats—are all quite similar in what they have to offer, with Skip the Dishes standing out only slightly for its options and for not having a subscription service. The real standout, though, is HeyChef, which, while its food options are extremely limited, is by far the cheapest and most convenient of the options, and even allows a student to use their Flex Dollars for their order. At the end of the day, the app a student spends their money on will be determined by which is best suited to them, whether it be because of specific features or the availability of one or more favourite restaurants.