For a lot of casual-dining brands, virtual brands have a temporary air. The dozens of wing concepts seem likely to fade away as soon as dine-in traffic resumes. Pasqually’s Pizza & Wings, however, is just getting started. One of the first big-name virtual brands, which was spun out of the Chuck E. Cheese franchise, is planning to remain long after kids and families are back in the restaurants, racking up tickets and guzzling soda and pizza. Sherri Landry, CMO at CEC Entertainment and parent of Chuck E. Cheese, Peter Piper […]
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When everything shut down, Boston College had to quickly rethink foodservice to ensure a safe way to provide staff and students with food. They looked to an automated food locker and jumped headfirst into the tricky process of off-premises technology innovation. The popular Hillside Café in the heart of campus served around 8,000 people a day, but it simply wasn’t large enough to do social distancing. When COVID-19 hit, Megan O’Neill, associate director of restaurant operations for the college, said it wasn’t safe to open when students returned for class. […]
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Olo, the multifaceted ordering and logistics platform for enterprise restaurants, reached a new milestone on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The company went public with an 18 million-share offering. The stock began trading at $32, a more than 20-percent premium over the originally expected price of $25. That put its market capitalization at $410 million and sent the company’s valuation to a staggering $4.5 billion. From the floor of the NYSE, founder and CEO Noah Glass told Food On Demand that, while the money is nice, there’s […]
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Through partnerships with Chicagoland chefs Fabio Vivani and Rick Tramonto, Foodhaul is a new company that’s looking to bring upscale food to underutilized restaurant and hospitality kitchens across the Upper Midwest and beyond with a new spin on the virtual restaurant model.
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The ongoing growth streak in online grocery orders hit a bump in the aisle during February with sales dropping 14 percent compared to the previous month according to a joint consumer survey by Brick Meets Click and Mercatus.
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DoorDash announced a new digital platform designed to highlight women-owned businesses on its platform, called Made by Women, along with a new partnership with ESPN commentator and two-time WNBA All-Star and Los Angeles Sparks forward Chiney Ogwumike.
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According to a new privacy report, national food delivery apps like Grubhub and Uber Eats are some of the most aggressive data collectors and are especially willing to share or sell that customer data to third parties. The report comes from pCloud, a private backup and encrypted data warehousing company. It ranks various companies on how much data they collect and how much they share with other companies. Atop both lists, of course, are social media companies like Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. Third-party delivery providers come in fourth on both […]
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The “dudes” in Florida are getting a nice windfall from Waitr. Publicly traded Waitr, which is based in Louisiana, announced it has entered an asset purchase agreement with Delivery Dudes. Waitr, the third-party delivery platform with a focus on smaller markets, said the transaction could close within the next week. CEO Carl Grimstad said it’s a good extension for Waitr to the Florida trade area with a well-loved brand. “Delivery Dudes affords us the opportunity to further expand our footprint in the Florida delivery marketplace,” said Grimstad in a release […]
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Denny’s (Nasdaq: DENN) is on track to be a virtual restaurant leader as it rolls out two delivery-only concepts to almost its entire network of 1,700 restaurants across the country. CEO John Miller said in a recent earnings call and appearance at the ICR Conference that the brand was rolling out two concepts: The Burger Den and The Meltdown. “The first of these is called The Burger Den,” said Miller. “This concept allows us to focus on one of our strengths, great burgers with new varieties using ingredients already in […]
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Deliveroo, one of Europe’s largest restaurant-delivery services and one which is backed by an investment from Amazon, announced plans to go public on the London Stock Exchange in a listing that could value the British food-delivery firm at around $7 billion and mark the biggest new share issue in Britain in three years.
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