How we cut average delivery time from 28 to 14 minutes in Nairobi.
By Operations Team · 4 May 2025 · 5 min read
A 50% improvement in median delivery time didn't come from a single breakthrough. It came from dozens of small improvements stacked on top of each other over twelve months.
Twelve months ago, the median delivery time for a Dashdrop order in Nairobi was 28 minutes. Today it sits at 14 minutes — a 50% improvement that came not from a single breakthrough but from dozens of small ones stacked on top of each other.
The single biggest driver was dispatcher routing. Our original algorithm assigned riders based purely on distance. We rebuilt it to factor in Nairobi's traffic patterns by time of day — specifically the brutal 07:30–09:30 and 17:00–19:30 windows — alongside rider velocity history and pickup queue depth at busy restaurants. That change alone took four minutes off the median.
The second driver was rider density. We grew our Nairobi rider pool from 80 to 190 over twelve months, reducing the average distance between a confirmed order and the nearest available rider. Combined with the routing improvements, orders that previously required a rider to travel 3.4 km to a pickup now average 1.8 km.
Our target for the end of 2025 is a 12-minute median. The remaining gains will come from merchant preparation times — helping our restaurant and pharmacy partners prepare orders before the rider arrives, rather than after.