After purchasing a majority stake in Latin America’s Cornershop grocery delivery service, Uber has announced a dramatic expansion of its grocery delivery offering into select cities in Latin America, Canada and, later this month, the United States. With the promise of more markets coming online soon, Uber has positioned this rollout as a significant part of its plans to find new opportunities for growth after the pandemic significantly curtailed ride-hailing volumes in cities across the globe. This product launch comes after grocery delivery experiments with more than 9,500 merchants in […]
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Domino’s Pizza has added a new service, Carside Delivery, that gives customers a new option to pick-up orders they’ve already paid for online. It’s now available in more than 6,100 U.S. locations. “Domino’s Carside Delivery gives customers the option to stay in their vehicle while a team member delivers their order to them, making for a convenient, contactless carryout experience,” said Dennis Maloney, Domino’s senior vice president and chief innovation officer. When customers place a prepaid digital carryout order, they’ll see the option for Domino’s Carside Delivery. Once they make […]
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Ritual, a Toronto-based tech startup, has launched a new service to help small- and medium-sized restaurants in the Chicago metro area set up delivery, takeout and contactless orders. Called Ritual ONE, the new service initially debuted in its home city before rolling out to Chicagoland in late June. For new restaurants on the platform, Ritual is offering a free commission promotion for the service that normally costs $49 per month for individual restaurant locations. Ritual added that “any current or new Ritual customers in the Chicago area will receive the […]
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After years of speculation about how the U.S. restaurant delivery scene will change with anticipated consolidation among the four largest third-party delivery services, the landscape has dramatically shifted with the news that Uber is in the process of buying Postmates, just weeks after Europe’s Just Eat Takeaway.com announced plans to purchase Grubhub. Just after the Independence Day weekend, on July 6th, Uber announced an agreement to acquire Postmates for approximately $2.65 billion in an all-stock transaction that will narrow the list of large-scale national delivery providers down to the “big […]
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Waitr, the Louisiana-based company that acquired Bite Squad and went public in 2018, shared some strong results ahead of its quarterly release after several difficult, money-losing quarters. According to Carl Grimstad, Waitr’s chairman and CEO, the strong performance is part COVID-19 and part sweeping changes the company undertook in late 2019 and early 2020. Those changes included a new CEO and numerous layoffs. “We are pleased to present a preliminary look at our second quarter results and we are excited to deliver strong revenue growth and profitability, driven, in part, […]
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After ponying up an all-stock offer of $4.9 billion to acquire Grubhub back in May, multiple reports suggest Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is swapping in some lighter tackle to land Postmates, the fourth largest U.S. restaurant delivery service, for a less biting $2.6 billion. Possibly playing hard to get, Reuters also reports that Postmates has revived its plans for an initial public offering, all suggesting the U.S. delivery scene will remain hotly contested moving into the dog days of summer. Much smaller than Uber Eats, Grubhub and market leader DoorDash, […]
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By now, most of us have had an experience where something that used to be totally normal is now disconcerting—like being handed a bag of takeout from somebody not wearing a mask or being bumped into by a stranger at the grocery store. Now that any human closeness or public physical contact is best avoided, CardFree is helping restaurants implement contactless ordering and payments to keep guests and staffers safe, secure and no less than an arm’s length away. Founded by Jon Squire, who has a deep background in the […]
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Target is diving deeper into online groceries with news that the Minneapolis-based retailer is bringing its fresh grocery pickup service national after successful pilots in the Twin Cities and Kansas City markets. Starting last week, Target’s expanded in-store order pickup and drive-up services are now available at an additional 400 stores in the Midwest, with a goal of reaching more than 1,500 stores by Christmas. The assortment now includes 750 items across produce, dairy, bakery, meat and frozen categories, in addition to the more than 250,000 items already available for […]
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A unique app that connects home cooks to their local community has gotten some real traction during the COVID-19 pandemic. WoodSpoon was founded a little over a year ago by two Israeli entrepreneurs living in New York. It was a labor of love for Jacnun, the flaky Israeli pastry co-founders Oren Saar and Merav Kalish Rozengarten couldn’t find anywhere. “We just missed our home food, the Middle Eastern dishes,” said Rozengarten. “We thought to ourselves, ‘How come there is nothing around us that helps us find our Israeli neighbors that […]
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A new report identifies five key things to watch for in the delivery space over the next few years. As outlined by financial analytics firm Canaccord Genuity, the report points to some ongoing trends, but also attempts to quantify the shift in the space due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The big macro theme: the online shift is accelerating. That’s the real push the industry has seen from the pandemic, a major influx of new diners to delivery platforms. That continues a trend that the firm’s authors said was growing steadily […]
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