Ghost kitchen operator ClusterTruck has a new model designed to help the company fill in existing markets and quickly scale new ones. ClusterTruck has been operating since 2016, founded on the principle of vertical integration. It controls the order platform, the cooking and the drivers through a single end-to-end software platform. When the company first started scaling up, founder and CEO Chris Baggott said the toughest aspect of the business was getting brand recognition in new markets. In Indianapolis, the company headquarters, a busy lunch hour for the home-town company […]
When the food-on-demand space exploded into the mainstream, it was initially a software play. Aggregators and delivery providers sought to have the fewest hard assets as possible, even eschewing employees in favor of the burgeoning gig-work industry. Gopuff SVP of Business Daniel Folkman said company founders Rafael Ilishayev and Yakir Gola started the company in 2013 with almost the opposite way of thinking. And they didn’t take any venture capital with scale-at-all-cost strings attached. “We spent those first years thinking through how we would make the business work if we […]
After a $100M investment, ezCater is more efficient than ever and planning an eventual IPO.
Pasha Mehran, formerly Uber Eats’ head of dark kitchens, joined C3 as chief strategy officer.
Uber Eats and Visa have teamed up on a $1 million grant program that will target small businesses that are currently active on Uber Eats in 10 U.S. cities.
Flipdish received a $100 million investment led by Tencent raising its valuation to more than $1.25 billion.
AI voice ordering is rolling out in a big way under a new partnership between the fast-food giant Checkers and tech partner Presto. The pair announced a plan to roll out an automated voice ordering assistant to all of the fast-food giant’s 267 company-operated locations. It marks by far the largest rollout of the technology, which continues to be tested across the drive-thru space. Checkers CEO Frances Allen said there were two big reasons the company committed to such a mass rollout: the upsell potential and, of course, staffing. Upselling […]
With sales of $97.7 billion, digital channels accounted for 13 percent of all grocery sales in the United States in 2021, according to Brick Meets Click’s State of the US eGrocery Market report.
Olo CEO Noah Glass shared his three top predictions for 2022 as the company embarks on its first full year as a public company. Aside from going public, Glass and Olo (NYSE: OLO) had a pretty good year as one of the go-to enterprise solutions for omnichannel restaurant transactions. He wrapped up 2021 and looked ahead during the 2022 ICR conference, which was held virtually for another year amid the omicron surge. The pandemic, while ugly, drove a lot of enterprise restaurant brands to rethink their technology stack. Several, Glass […]
*This is content sponsored by Omnivore. The pace of digital transformation in the restaurant industry is only accelerating. Omnivore CEO Dan Singer said keeping up in that marathon requires more open, efficient ways of connecting to digital tools. “Just start with the pandemic, you think about what happened immediately: contactless payment, drive-thru, third-party, all of this is the new normal. That spurred the digital journey,” said Singer. Payments anywhere, everywhere Digital payments offer evidence of the continued shift for consumers. A recent survey from consulting firm Deloitte found that nearly […]
