Almost instantaneously, Red Rooster has become the third largest food business delivery service in Australia.

Approximately 14 months since pressing the go button on a delivery service rollout, 230 sites out of 360 nationally are now offering home delivery.

Chris Green, CEO of Red Rooster, which is part of Australia’s largest owned restaurant operator, Quick Service Restaurant Holdings’ (QSRH), who also operate the Oporto and Chicken Treat brands, told Inside Retail that Red Rooster had set a target of rolling out the delivery service to another 30-40 sites in the next three to six months.

“To get that big, that quickly is quite remarkable,” he said. “And I think that one of the key things is there’s almost a hole in the market – there’s pizza, Chinese, Indian, Thai – but people also love roast chicken and it hasn’t been available from a delivery perspective.”

Green said the established Aussie brand has set sights on overtaking Pizza Hut to become number two in the home delivery stakes, by doubling the current amount of deliveries in the next eight months. Currently, the chicken chain fulfils approximately 100 deliveries per week at each restaurant, with the aim of doubling this figure in 12 months.

A successful trial of the delivery service at one restaurant, followed by seven stores in different locations expanded eventually into a cluster trial in Perth before the decision to go national was made.

“It was really about finding an opportunity for Red Rooster to grow, there’s no doubt that it’s a brand that’s been around a long time and really it was looking at ways to innovate and make it more accessible really for more customers,” said Green.

The response from consumers has been ‘unsurprising’, given the brand considers home delivery “a silver bullet within the brand.”

Green said from a sales perspective, the chain is running at close to 30,000 deliveries a week Australia wide. Home delivery is also introducing the brand to new customers.

“I think technology absolutely is critical and if you look at Domino’s they play on the technology and they’ve been a market leader,” he said.

“But what I really think is driving delivery, is convenience and I almost call it super convenience because customers are just extremely time poor and they want to save as much time as possible.”

Initially the company was using using Menulog, which Green said “worked out well” because of their large customer base online. Currently, Red Rooster operates both its own online platform it developed in tandem with the Menulog service. “We’ve actually decided to keep both because even though we believe ours is a better experience, the Menulog one brings in new customers for us.”

And for all the bangs and whistles associated with implementing a digital marketing strategy, the anecdotal story of a Red Rooster franchisee in Melbourne delivering to one address, only for the same driver to deliver next door within 20 minutes because the neighbour ‘saw the shiny red car’, means the service brings free advertising by virtue of the chain’s insistence on having identifiable delivery vehicles.

“Often you see a lot of delivery businesses, they have crappy looking cars,” said Green. “This is versus having a shiny red car which is a big part of the brand especially because it’s bringing a lot of new customers to the brand.”

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