Hubbub and My Salivation: delivering the goods

On a mission: Marisa Leaf, managing director of Hubbub

Delivery food occupies a lowly status in the UK. Takeaways are synonymous with a miserable-looking floppy pizza or a greasy curry and while grocery deliveries – boutique or otherwise – are on the up, they haven’t quite yet surged to the levels of success enjoyed over in the US, the convenience capital. So what’s going wrong? I mean, come on, how easy are these people trying to make it for us?

One reason us Brits aren’t biting on the meal delivery front is that the food often falls short of restaurant quality, yet holds a painful price tag anyway. But in Hackney, this needn’t be the case, according to enthusiastic New Yorker Evan Graj, founder of East London-based delivery service My Salivation.

His concept is simple – food from your favourite local restaurants delivered by hand for a small fee and with no compromise in quality. “Our aim is to dispel the myth that delivery food is bad,” Evan says.

Evan is a foodie and former banker who stepped out of the square mile to pursue his big ambition last November and with the help of a web development team, My Salivation – a tongue-in-cheek take on ‘my salvation’ – is now online. Users enter their postcode and are then presented with a list of local restaurants signed up to the service.

Once a selection is made from the restaurants regular menu – with no extra costs added – the process begins. “We have an SMS gateway to communicate with the restaurant and customer,” says Evan. “We provide people with a realistic delivery time, so get rid of that age-old delivery question: ‘where the hell is my food?’”

Most cuisines are covered in the offering, with the exception of sushi – which Evan is unremittingly attempting to change. Broadway Market’s popular Italian Bella Vita is listed, along with Shoreditch vegan café Saf, Brick Lane Indian restaurants and Hackney’s famous Vietnamese eateries. “Hackney is a foodie borough,” says Evan. “While people out west may look for the most expensive high end restaurant, east Londoners want what’s authentic.”

In the grocery delivery world, London has also been ramping things up a notch. Here, being bulk delivered enough toilet roll to last a nuclear apocalypse is especially appealing for the large proportion of us without access to cars. But reluctance to buy fresh produce without having the option to handpick it ourselves, thus guaranteeing the quality, has left a gap in the market for more premium services.

The homely vans of organic trailblazers Abel and Cole are a common site around Hackney and a throng of successors such as Highbury Barn Deliveries and Hubbub is hot on their heels. Hubbub acts as a kind of wholesome foodie go-between. They deliver to your home, but only from high-end local independent shops.

Marisa Leaf, managing director of Hubbub explains: “Our local butchers, bakers and fishmongers are struggling to compete with the big multiples. That matters because these independent businesses make our communities thrive; they employ local people and local services, enhance the quality, choice and control we have over the food we buy and reduce the distance we need to travel to shop.

“I realised that lots more people would buy from their local independents if it was as easy as shopping at the supermarket; starting Hubbub was the way to make that possible.”

Hubbub currently covers north and west Lond-on, with plans to expand, and delivers food from such esteemed purveyors as the Ginger Pig, La Fromagerie and the E5 Bakehouse. They take your shopping list, do all the leg work and deliver it all in one go, and as with My Salivation there is no extra charge. The trend harks back to the halcyon days of the milk float, or the village shop who would box up your weekly order, a somewhat quaint nuance in an otherwise rapid-moving ‘need it now’ world.

Grass roots businesses are making ripples in consumer habits in Hackney, but as Evan says, it’s a change in people’s attitudes that will make a lasting difference.

My Salivation founder Evan Graj flanked by his deliverers, Shaon Ali (L) and Waqar Ahmed (R)