With so many meals leaving restaurants by customer pickup and delivery drivers, one might think the pandemic has launched a gold rush of restaurant brands upgrading off-premises shelving to heated, frozen and cooled solutions. But not according to one leading manufacturer, who says the dwell time problem is typically best solved with better packaging and a more streamlined kitchen. This “less is more” approach—from a manufacturer of smart shelves that can text customers when their food is ready, no less—is at odds with Apex Order Technologies’ recent acquisition of Brightloom’s […]
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A staple of the American Chinese food category with more than 2,200 locations, Panda Express made waves last summer by announcing plans for direct delivery through its Panda Delivers program. Those plans were accelerated by the pandemic, as the brand’s third-party delivery sales doubled, and included native customer delivery through its app and website. Below is an excerpt of a Q&A exchange with Nidhin Mattappally, executive director, digital and restaurant experience, and Evelyn Wah, executive director of brand innovation, for Panda Express. Their responses have been lightly edited for length. […]
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After years of rumors and testing, the first non-beta drone deliveries of restaurant meals could take off this time next year through an ongoing partnership between Camile Thai and Manna, both based in Dublin, Ireland. Brody Sweeney, director at Camile Thai, said his franchised fast-casual restaurant chain has rounded a corner with its ongoing drone deliveries in Ireland. If all goes according to plan, as the drone testing moves from a tiny village into a larger city, Camile expects to exit beta testing and begin at-scale drone operations in the […]
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It’s not every day a 19-year-old starts a franchise restaurant. It’s similarly uncommon for a new restaurant brand’s first franchisees to find themselves building their first stores just as the pandemic began to shut down the world around them. For Florida-based Bahia Bowls, unexpected challenges have been the norm of its four years of existence, but low food costs have enabled it to profit on newly high volumes through third-party delivery services. On his quest to hit 25 units by the end of 2021, Bahia Bowls Co-founder and Owner Ben […]
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ShiftPixy has been working toward a hybrid native-gig delivery model for some time now, but a big new partnership gets the staffing platform one step closer. The company’s overall aim is to bring efficiency to the part-time labor market by taking over the overhead of insurance. As CEO Scott Absher explains, that’s especially helpful when it comes to delivery. “The underlying strategy is we own the human capital; the operator terminates the employees we hire them and lease them back. That allows them to redispatch and redeploy people so we […]
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The shareholders of Just Eat Takeaway.com (Just Eat) have formally approved the monster acquisition of Grubhub that would deliver the company a U.S. foothold. The shareholder vote approved much of the $6.9 billion proposal. Grubhub’s founder and CEO Matt Maloney will be named to the board along two Grubhub insiders. In addition, the sale price was accepted and the first half of 2021 timeframe is still the anticipated closing date. According to a tally of 110 million shareholder votes, most everything was approved with more than 80 percent approval. The […]
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With the fresh idea of creating a delivery marketplace exclusively for independent pizzerias, Slice has attracted more than $80 million from investors who see the massive potential of helping small pizza restaurants compete with the Domino’s and Papa John’s of the world in technology, bulk pricing and marketing. Slice, after recently surpassing more than a billion dollars in transactions on the platform from 14,000 partnered restaurants, is stepping on the gas to go further than just aggregating customer demand. With a unique model that Slice’s co-founder and CEO Ilir Sela […]
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If online banking now has a social media function to see which of your friends are sending money to each other, why shouldn’t meal ordering join the party? That’s the basic concept at Snackpass, a three-year-old app designed by Yale students that helps fellow students save time and money by ordering meals and coffee ahead of time, and then bypassing the line once they arrive. Taking the order-ahead concept a step further, Snackpass lets users see what items their friends are ordering and from where, with the ability to give […]
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As once-temporary pandemic habits become set in stone, Mercatus has released an update on what it calls the “egrocery” market, looking at what factors are impacting online grocery shopper loyalty and what features are becoming most important to shoppers who are now buying their weekly staples online. At a high level, Mercatus and its consumer insights partner Incisiv predict that online grocery will account for 21.5 percent of total grocery sales by 2025, which is a more than 60 percent increase over pre-pandemic estimates. The partnership’s new “eGrocerys’ New Reality” […]
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It’s easy to get caught up in the hype around ghost kitchens and virtual brands, the sexy new channels taking up a huge amount of air in the restaurant industry right now. As the hype train chugs along, operators like Capriotti’s, a Las Vegas-based sandwich shop known for high-quality subs, is taking a careful approach to these new ideas. As David Bloom, Capriotti’s chief development and operations officer said, while they saw the same COVID difficulties, these new channels had been part of the roadmap for years. “I’ve been seeing […]
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