Deliveroo is a food delivery service that is relatively new to Oxford but has been going strong in other cities around the country. They deliver from restaurants, pubs and cafes in the city that may not otherwise have a takeaway option. Their mission is to deliver great quality food and inject some variety into your usual takeaway choices.

It’s a simple yet brilliant idea, and once we heard about it we immediately started listing our favourite restaurants and hoping they would get on-board (we’re talking to you, Mario’s). At the moment in Oxford you can choose from Mission Burrito, The Rusty Bicycle, Carluccio’s and many other places, and it’s great to see independent venues on the list.

After typing in your postcode on Deliveroo’s easy to use website, you are presented with a list of food places within delivering distance of you. In Oxford, this, unsurprisingly, means cycling distance (once you start to notice the Deliveroo couriers zooming around the city on their bikes, you’ll start seeing them everywhere!)

After choosing your venue, you can pull up a menu, which is often a modified (and occasionally more expensive) version of the venue’s menu, and place your order online. The charge for delivery is a flat rate of £2.50, which seems pretty reasonable. Once you have placed your order, you are given a waiting time.

We chose to order from the White Rabbit in central Oxford to our office on Cowley Road and were given a waiting time of 40 minutes. To our delight, it arrived in less than 30 minutes and we could see the heat coming off the pizzas as they emerged from the Deliveroo pouch. Unfortunately, we were one pizza short, a disappointing oversight on the part of the courier. Luckily, a helpful Deliveroo staff member picked up our call instantly and had another pizza sent out to us straight away.

It might be handy for there to be more delivery options on the website, or a place to type in delivery instructions. On the summary page for our order, we couldn't see which of our pizzas were gluten-free and which ones were not. But perhaps these small website refinements will happen in good time. Overall, the service was easy to use and very speedy. Deliveroo has already started to expand in the city and once they have settled in and ironed out the kinks, they’re sure to be people’s go-to takeaway service in no time.

This was a free trial of the service, courtesy of Deliveroo. Many thanks for this opportunity.