# The phone call that gets your food cooking

> A notification is easy to miss in a busy kitchen. Here is how we decide when a restaurant hears about an order, and the automatic call that follows when cooking has not started.

- Source: https://blog.laayo.com.np/reminding-restaurants-to-accept
- Section: Engineering
- Author: Laayo Engineering (Laayo Services Pvt. Ltd.)
- Published: October 14, 2026
- Topics: Restaurants, Notifications, Voice, Orders

Picture a small kitchen at lunchtime. The tablet is propped against a jar of achar, the gas is roaring, someone is shouting an order through the window. A new order chimes once. Nobody hears it.

From the customer's side, nothing happens. The order says the rider is on the way to the restaurant, the rider arrives, and the food has not been started. That one missed chime has just turned a quick meal into a long one.

This post is about two changes that attack that problem from both ends: telling the restaurant at the right moment, and calling them when the message does not land.

## Tell the restaurant when a rider is coming

It sounds backwards, but the restaurant used to hear about some orders **too early**. Prepaid orders rang the kitchen the moment payment went through, before any rider had agreed to deliver them. Cash orders could trigger automatic reminders to the restaurant while still waiting for a rider. Kitchens started cooking food that then sat on the counter going cold while we looked for someone to carry it.

So we changed the rule. For deliveries made by our riders, the restaurant's new-order alert now waits until **a rider is on the order**. For prepaid orders, that is the moment a rider takes it. For cash orders, the restaurant hears once the rider has accepted. We are rolling out a further step that waits for the rider's final confirmation on cash orders.

A few things deliberately skip the wait:

- **Takeaway and self-delivery orders.** There is no rider to wait for, so the restaurant hears straight away.
- **A manual nudge from our team.** If someone in operations sends a reminder, it goes through.
- **A switch.** The whole rule can be turned off from settings in seconds if it ever causes trouble.

There is a trade-off. A prepaid order that no rider picks up is not seen by the restaurant until someone assigns a rider. That is why our operations app raises an alert for any order waiting too long without a rider, and why assigning a rider from that app now moves the order forward properly.

## Then, if nothing happens, we call

Even a well-timed alert can be missed. So when a rider is on an order and the restaurant has not moved it to cooking within a short time, Laayo **calls the restaurant**.

The call comes from Laayo's own phone line. It rings every number the restaurant has given us at the same time, the shop phone, the owner and staff on duty, and plays a short message in Nepali: hello, this is Laayo, you have a new order, the last digits of the order number, the items, the rider's first name, and a request to start it in the app.

We kept the message short on purpose. Early versions read the full order number and repeated the whole message. It was clear, but long, and a long call is both expensive and annoying to someone with their hands full. The current message plays once and says only what the cook needs to act.

If cooking still has not started, the call comes again after a few more minutes. Every round also sends a loud alert to the partner app.

![When a rider is on the order, the restaurant gets a loud alert. If cooking has not started, an automatic call in Nepali follows, and our team is alerted if calls go unanswered.](https://blog.laayo.com.np/media/seed/accept-reminders.svg)

## The second kind of late

Starting late is one problem. Finishing late is another. When a restaurant marks an order as cooking, it tells us how long it will take. If that time passes and the food still has not been handed to the rider, a similar call goes out: your order is ready to be picked up, the rider is waiting.

## Knowing whether anyone heard

A call that nobody answered is not the same as a call that was ignored. The phone system can tell whether a person picked up or the call went to voicemail, and whether the whole message played. Every call is logged against its order with that outcome, so in the operations app we can see "picked up, heard the message" or "no answer" next to the order.

If the last round goes unanswered and the order still has not moved, our operations team gets an alert to step in, usually by calling a person they know at that restaurant.

## What we did not build, yet

- **Per-restaurant opt-out and quiet hours.** Some restaurants would like calls only at certain times. That is on the list.
- **Calls for every order type.** Takeaway and self-delivery orders are skipped by design, because no Laayo rider is waiting.

## What's next

The best reminder is the one we never have to send. We are working with restaurant partners on louder, clearer alerts in the partner app, and on spotting kitchens that regularly need a call, so our team can visit and help set things up. If you run a restaurant on Laayo and the calls feel too frequent or too late, tell us. We can tune the timing, and your kitchen is the one that has to live with it.