Services · Mobile app development · Food delivery apps
Codeeo offers food delivery app development in London for restaurant groups, dark kitchens, grocers and caterers who want direct orders under their own brand. We build the customer app, the kitchen and dispatch tools and the admin system behind them, shaped around how London actually eats: office lunches in the City, late orders to flats with tricky entry codes, and kitchens that serve several boroughs at once. Every order you take directly is a customer whose details, history and loyalty stay with you.
Our team works remotely with London clients. Discovery, design reviews and sprint demos run by video call, and you see working builds on your own phone throughout, so decisions are made against real screens rather than slides.
200+ companies servedFrom a first store to an ADX listed developer
Built for London orders
A London ordering app has to cope with addresses that are hard to find, customers who move between home and an office in another borough, and lunchtime spikes that arrive within minutes. Postcodes alone rarely describe where a driver needs to go when the drop is on the twelfth floor of a tower with a concierge desk. We design for those details first.
The features below are the ones London operators ask about most. Few apps need all of them on launch day; discovery decides which belong in the first release and which follow once you see how customers use it. Each one connects to the kitchen screen and the admin system, so staff are not copying orders between tools during a Friday evening rush.
This is what separates custom food delivery app development in London from a white label template: the app is modelled on your kitchens, your zones and your customers, not on a generic restaurant.
Customers save building names, floor, flat number, gate codes and concierge notes against each address. Drivers see a pin, the instructions and a call button that masks both numbers, which matters in estates and new blocks where the postcode covers a whole street.
Fewer failed drops and fewer cold meals carried back to the kitchen.
Draw zones by travel time rather than radius, because a short distance across the river can take far longer than a longer run along a quiet road. Each zone carries its own minimum order, delivery charge and cut off time, set from the admin system.
Delivery promises customers can trust across different parts of the city.
Group baskets where colleagues add their own dishes before a set time, one delivery to reception and invoices for company accounts. Useful for kitchens near the City, Canary Wharf, King's Cross and other areas with heavy weekday lunch trade.
Larger weekday orders that arrive on a predictable schedule.
Each menu item records which of the fourteen regulated allergens it contains, shown before the customer pays and repeated on the order label. Kitchens can mark dishes unavailable when a recipe or supplier changes, so the app never shows outdated information.
Allergen information sits at the two points the rules expect.
Orders land on a tablet in the kitchen with prep times per dish, so the dispatcher books a driver at the right moment rather than when the order arrives. Multi brand kitchens see each virtual brand clearly labelled on the same queue.
Food leaves the pass when the driver is actually there.
If you run your own riders, they get a simple app for accepting jobs, route guidance, proof of delivery photos and cash or card reconciliation. Vehicle details can be recorded too, which helps when checking bikes and cars against London's emission zone rules.
One record of who delivered what, and when.
Where a supported integration exists, orders from the large marketplaces can be pulled into the same kitchen queue as your direct orders. Staff stop juggling separate tablets, and you see total volume in one report.
One queue for every channel, wherever the order came from.
Customers book a slot for later today or the weekend, or choose collection from the nearest site. Slot limits stop the kitchen accepting more than it can cook for a given quarter hour.
Demand spread across the evening instead of hitting at once.
Larger chains in England with 250 or more employees must show calories on online menus and delivery platforms as well as in store. The app holds calorie values per dish and per portion, alongside filters for vegan, halal, gluten free and other dietary needs that London customers search for. Smaller operators can switch calorie display on or off as they choose.
Menu information that suits both the rules and the customer.
Points or stamps on direct orders, one tap reorder of a favourite meal and push notifications for new dishes. Marketing messages only go to people who agreed to receive them, with preferences stored against each account.
More repeat customers ordering through your own channel.
Who this suits
Online food ordering app development in London looks different for each operator. London food businesses differ a great deal depending on where they cook and who they feed. A Soho restaurant, a delivery only kitchen in an industrial unit in the outer boroughs and a family grocer in Southall each need something different from an app. These are the four starting points we see most, and how the first release changes for each.
Each site has its own menu variations, opening hours and delivery area, yet customers expect one app and one account. We build a shared menu with site level overrides, route each order to the nearest kitchen that can fulfil it, and give head office reporting across every location. Managers at each site control their own availability without calling the central team.
Each site manages itself while customers see one brand.
Virtual brands cooked from one kitchen need separate storefronts but a single prep queue. We set each brand up with its own menu, imagery and listing inside the app, while the kitchen screen groups tickets by station. Food registration still sits with the borough where the kitchen operates, so the admin system keeps those details and the hygiene rating with each site record.
Halal butchers, kosher bakeries, Caribbean and Korean grocers and other specialist shops in London often have loyal customers spread across the city. An app built for a catalogue of weighed and packaged items, with substitutions, slot booking and age checks for alcohol, suits this better than a restaurant template. Drivers check ID at the door for alcohol orders, and the app records that the check happened.
Corporate catering runs on advance orders, headcounts, dietary needs per person and monthly invoicing. We build ordering for office managers, labelled individual meals with allergen details, delivery windows tied to building access rules and account billing. It replaces spreadsheets and email threads with a system that keeps a history. Repeat schedules let a regular client book the same Tuesday lunch for weeks ahead.
Office catering needs accounts, not just baskets.
Working with us
Most clients begin with a fixed scope first release covering the customer app, kitchen screen and admin system for one or two sites. After launch, a monthly retainer keeps the app updated as menus, operating systems and payment rules change. Groups planning several brands or a large estate of sites sometimes take a dedicated team instead. All of it runs remotely, with the same team from discovery through support. Food delivery app developers in London are easy to find; what matters is a team that stays with the product after launch and understands how a kitchen behaves under pressure.
A defined build with a deadline
We agree what the product has to do, write it down with a price and a date, and build exactly that. Changes are priced before they are made, not discovered on the invoice.
A product that keeps evolving
Named engineers who work your hours, join your standups and stay on the codebase. You direct the backlog; we own the quality of what ships.
Something live that needs looking after
A monthly block of hours for improvements, fixes and the small requests that otherwise wait months. Unused hours carry for a quarter.
Technology
We usually build the customer app cross platform for iOS and Android, with the admin system on the web and a cloud backend sized for lunchtime and Friday night peaks. Payment providers and marketplace integrations are chosen to suit your setup. Apple Pay and Google Pay sit beside card payments, with Strong Customer Authentication handled by the provider.
01Mobile
02Data and cloud
03Marketing and tracking
It depends on the number of sites, apps and integrations in the first release.
A single kitchen with a customer app and admin system is a much smaller project than a multi borough group needing a driver app, marketplace intake and corporate accounts. We agree the first release in discovery and set the plan from that scope, written down before design starts. Features that are not essential for launch, such as loyalty or catering accounts, often follow in a second release once real orders show what customers use. Cost follows the same drivers: how many apps, sites and integrations, plus how much menu data needs cleaning first.
Schedule a free consultation and get a written recommendation, with costs, before you commit to anything.
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