We partnered with e-cargo delivery company Pedal Me in November 2020 in order to reduce our emissions and make Just Eat for Business a more eco-friendly corporate catering service.
So far, the Pedal Me team has delivered over 330 orders to offices around London, which means their riders have travelled about 1,500km. This has helped us to save approximately 340kg of CO2 and counting!
We caught up with Ben, CEO of Pedal Me, to find out more about the company, their ethos, and what's in store for the future.
What is Pedal Me and why did you start the company?
We use bespoke hi-tech, e-assist cargo bikes and highly trained riders to do jobs on bikes that you wouldn’t have thought possible - carrying people to hospital; children to school; veg boxes to peoples houses; and large scale office hot food orders - sometimes up to 300 covers!
We set up the company to challenge the conventional way of doing logistics in cities, which generally uses large, slow metal boxes which are bad for climate change, bad for the city, bad for business, and just straight up inefficient.
We already knew this as the result of a previous project we’d worked on: teaching people to ride bikes in council estates, for which we’d had to transport bikes around. We found vans to be a hopelessly expensive and inefficient way of doing this, compared to using cargo bikes and trailers.
What does Pedal Me offer that makes the service stand out from traditional last-mile delivery providers?
We are unique in a number of ways:
1. We use employees rather than contractors. Sick pay, holiday pay, opportunities for advancement - the whole lot. This means that our staff know we care for them and therefore they care much more for our clients. They are a smiley, smart, motivated staff getting the job done to a much higher standard than traditional contractor-based logistics companies could hope to do.
2. We are the lowest possible emission way to carry out the jobs we do. The embedded carbon in the manufacture of a single electric vehicle will take us 300,000km - and the difference between our emissions and fossil-fuelled vehicles is even more striking. Our lighter weight means much lower particulate emissions than even the most efficient electric vehicles.
3. “Everyone rides”, which means all staff are trained to ride, including our mechanics, operations staff, and all senior leadership. This means that not only are our staff motivated by the fact that riding is at the core of what we do, but we are also able to scramble senior staff to cover jobs where there are more bookings than we’d anticipated, or staff have mechanical issues. This makes us significantly more reliable than the alternatives.
Has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your business at all?
Our traditional markets - mainly business-to-business deliveries - were completely devastated by lockdown as businesses shut their doors. We’ve reacted and re-purposed, beefing up our tech to allow us to be better at doing home deliveries, setting up a warehousing and fulfilment offer for startups doing home deliveries, and taking cancer patients to hospital (they are generally keen to avoid more risky indoor spaces like motor vehicles). Today our revenues are about the same as they were before COVID-19, but without COVID-19 we would have been about double the size that we are today.
We started working with Pedal Me a few months ago. Why should other businesses use Pedal Me for their deliveries?
We’re the shiny happy people in pink, spreading good vibes and being significantly better than alternatives - while also helping you cut your carbon footprint. Get involved by emailing sales@pedalme.co.uk.
What’s in store for the future?
We’re currently raising money to help us expand - so expect to see more people in pink around London in the near future!
If you'd like to find out more about our sustainability efforts, check out our People & Planet initiative for updates.
