The third-annual Food On Demand Conference is going all in on ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants, customer attraction through loyalty and direct marketing, helping restaurant operators know where to dedicate finite resources with more channels than ever and Designing the Restaurant of the Future. Held in Las Vegas, March 30 through April 1, this event will be the largest yet, with three days of content dedicated to the future of restaurants, foodservice, delivery, catering and takeout. FODC kicks off Monday afternoon with a quick look at the state of the off-premises […]
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The term “self delivery”—which, of course, means customer pickup—never fails to solicit a laugh here at FOD, but nothing’s funny for restaurants looking to convert delivery customers to takeout customers willing to grab their meals in person. To evaluate the changing takeout landscape, we chose a handful of nearby chain restaurants to order soup and whatever else on a cold winter’s day. Results ranged from fantastic to “what the hell”? Aside from including soup in the order, we were instructed to order directly from the restaurant’s website or app. We evaluated […]
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Large companies like Domino’s, Starbucks, Panera and Chipotle are envied for their ability to invest massive investments in technology, especially in terms of customer engagement and loyalty. Not everyone is so fortunate. But now Thanx CEO Zach Goldstein, who has a background working with large-scale restaurants and retailers at Bain & Company, is providing smaller restaurants with resources to maximize the lifetime value of their best customers and compete with the same weapons employed by the world’s largest chains. “You’ve seen the legacy players who are still operating very much […]
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The future of the restaurant industry is hard to imagine, but the National Restaurant Association (NRA) worked with a group of futurists to see how the future of convenient food will likely look based on the industry’s trajectory and the expansion of technology. NRA partnered with Foresight Alliance, a team of futurists who help companies build long-term business plans with scientific methods and deep research. Within the delivery and convenience space, they found six key things to watch in the next 10 years of innovation and how to think about […]
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A new study making the rounds shows DoorDash drivers making just $1.45 base hourly pay before tips and making the food-delivery economy at large look pretty dismal. And without real-world data, this is what makes the news. The report appeared on Salon, and a handful of other news sources, spreading some pretty bad data around about a growing and volatile industry. The study, and that term should be used lightly here, was put forth by PayUp.wtf, a website and organization founded by Instacart workers and labor advocacy group, Working Washington, […]
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Virtual restaurant operation is one of the sexy new things that has restaurants buzzing, but as the virtual restaurant segment grows, there seem to be three dominant paths that take full advantage of the potential for new ways of doing business. Industry leaders tackled that complex topic at the 2020 ICR conference in a panel titled “The Off-Premises Boom: How restaurants are evolving to answer consumer demand.” Jim Collins, co-founder and CEO of Kitchen United, said fully virtual operations are complicated things to run, so they no longer allow truly […]
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The bigger third-party delivery gets, the more incentives restaurants have to move Grubhub, DoorDash or Postmates customers to in-house channels that don’t cost nearly as much. Filling this gap between self delivery and using national delivery brands that charge upwards of 25-35 percent per order, ChowNow is one of several companies springing up to help restaurants generate and fulfill their own delivery orders, with the mirage-like promise of paying much smaller per-order fees for each meal that leaves the restaurant in a bag or box. Now eight years old, ChowNow […]
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Last week, the food tech industry and VC world was abuzz with yet another SoftBank investment making drastic changes. For in all the bluster and grand statements about Zume in the media last week, the facts around the company that was part pizza company, part packaging manufacturer and part mobile kitchen brand got a bit mixed up. Yes, there are some big changes, but the 80 percent hack job is not quite right, according to the company. “The reality is that 53 percent of Zume’s workforce has been separated. Additionally, […]
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Consumers with Chase credit cards now have free subscriptions to DoorDash’s DashPass service, which gives members $0 delivery fees and reduced service charges on orders of $12 or more. This partnership is being touted as the first of its kind due to the sheer scale, as JPMorgan Chase has $2.74 trillion assets and is the largest bank in the country. Without getting into the fine print, a joint DoorDash-Chase release said the free DashPass subscriptions are for Chase’s Sapphire Reserve and Preferred cardholders. Carriers of the less swanky Chase Freedom, […]
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Customers “self delivering” their own meals and retail goods—meaning they pick them up instead of having them delivered—has become a hot focal area in the delivery world. The latest company jumping on the bandwagon is Instacart, which just announced a national expansion of its customer pickup option. The national rollout of the Instacart Pickup feature follows a multi-month pilot where the company gained feedback from customers trying out the service. Based on generally positive responses, according to the company, it’s extending the program to include nearly 200 stores across 25 […]
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