There’s another hyper-local delivery platform coming in Nashville. Yes, another one! TripDelivers launched in January as an alternative to the big-name, third-party platforms. In fact, the landing page for the company and app calls out a number of the practices well known in the industry like percentage fees for restaurants, menu markups (which are generally at behest of restaurants) and lack of transparency in the process. Founder Robert McNulty said they wanted to do a few things differently. First, there is only a flat fee for restaurants after a $150 […]
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Olo, one of the first big-name digital delivery order aggregators, is set to go public soon. The company filed its S-1 prospectus with lots of new details in its first public pitch to Wall Street. The New York-based company looks to raise $100 million in a public offering. For the unfamiliar, Olo describes itself as the “Leading SaaS Platform for On-Demand Restaurant Commerce.” The company has a laser focus on enterprise restaurant brands, as Chief Customer Officer Marty Hahnfeld told Food On Demand last month. It integrates digital orders and […]
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DoorDash acquired robotic salad maker Chowbotics in a new push to give merchant partners additional options to deliver. The top delivery platform that went public in December announced the Chowbotics acquisition in a blog post. It noted that the “proven” model with more than 100 “Sally” machines on campuses, hospitals and grocery stores is truly incremental for merchants that want to put one of the machines in their facility. “What excites us most about Chowbotics is the team has developed a remarkable tool that will allow DoorDash merchants to grow. […]
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Delivery profitability remains one of the biggest debates in the food-delivery space. The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified that topic dramatically as the majority of restaurants continue doing a huge portion of their business in pickup and delivery channels. A large number of operators are either looking at profitability for the first time or reassessing as more of their business is going out via delivery. For either, it’s worth a bit of a thought experiment about the delivery economics. For our hypothetical FODrucker’s restaurant, let’s take a look at the impact […]
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Zuul is now moving into the restaurant technology space with the release of its ZuulOS that helps operators manage multi-brand restaurant and ghost kitchen operations. It’s an increasingly crowded space, as the restaurant software industry reacts to the fast rise of ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants.
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Uber announced its fourth-quarter financial results, which also included full-year results for 2020. The prime highlights are year-over-year delivery bookings up nearly 130 percent as food delivery has pulled even with its ride-sharing business. Even so, Uber reported a net loss of $968 million for the quarter.
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As the very definition of a restaurant is in flux, legacy point-of-sale providers and cloud-based upstarts are scrambling to build technology that makes it easy to keep multiple brands humming without manually entering data between platforms never intended to work together.
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The industry can add two more novel virtual restaurant companies to the list. The first, a revenue-sharing model, Trivr Eats. The second is the first legally defined virtual restaurant franchise: Local Culinary. Both emphasize speed to market and a focus on high-quality culinary offerings, but with their own special operational models. Trivr founders Frank Chiodo and Brady Grover said they’re looking closely at the small independent operator who has plenty to do aside from coming up with a new virtual brand. “One the initial questions is, ‘Can you take 50 […]
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Grubhub announced fourth quarter and full-year earnings in potentially its last year as a private company. Earnings from the Chicago-based company were somewhat mixed, but Grubhub’s overall revenue was up significantly.
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Food Dudes is a restaurant delivery service that’s finding success in cities and towns that are much smaller than any burg served by the biggest players in the industry. With a lean team and a remote headquarters team, Food Dudes is profitable, growing across the prairie and looking to maintain its independence amid a blizzard of mergers and acquisitions.
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