Here we go with the first big delivery headline of 2020: The Wall Street Journal reports that Grubhub, the second largest U.S. delivery provider, has hired a financial advisor to explore strategic options, possibly including a sale, as optimism has morphed into caution as large-scale delivery brands continue focusing on user growth above quarterly profits. While Grubhub hasn’t commented on the WSJ report, the company took a beating in the press after reporting its third-quarter 2019 results, in which Grub missed analyst expectations and saw orders decrease 15 percent over […]
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The pixels were still drying on our Q&A with Waitr’s new CEO Adam Price when news hit that Price resigned from the captain’s chair and board of directors and is being replaced by Carl Grimstad. He’s chief manager of C. Grimstad Associates, a family- office investment firm. For Louisiana-based Waitr, this is only the latest high-profile departure after an exceptionally tumultuous year for the fifth-largest U.S. restaurant delivery service. Waitr reported losing $220.1 million in the fourth quarter of 2019 on revenues of $49.2 million. Aside from being the company’s […]
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Catering remains hot as an increasing share of the restaurant business heads out onto the streets. Occupying the middle ground between hungry at-home consumers and mega-catering firms like ezCater that primarily service corporate accounts, Ohio-based DeliverThat is a last-mile offering that provides a lower-cost delivery option than many larger, national delivery and catering brands. The company’s unique flat-fee model is gaining traction, with approximately $35 million in sales on the platform during 2019. Started with a new Twitter account and $60 in cash six years ago, DeliverThat CEO Aaron Hoffman […]
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Trade wars are hot topics these days, and the latest to pop up is pitting Little Caesars against its much larger national pizza competitors. Once a delivery skeptic, Little Caesars is getting into direct-to-consumer delivery through an exclusive partnership with DoorDash Drive, which the Detroit-based pizza player claims will result in pizzas that are “at least $5 less” than similar orders from Pizza Hut, Domino’s and Papa John’s. With a reputation for affordable pizzas that are hot and ready for customer pickup, Little Caesars says its delivered pies will come […]
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One of the biggest topics of discussion during the massive Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas was the future of smart cities and all the innovative thinking and hard work between the cities of today and a truly smart city. “We’re on the cusp of dramatic disruption,” said Brian Collie, a managing director and senior partner at Boston Consulting Group. “Franky, we have no choice but to get this right. Cities today are already overcrowded and facing many challenges, and as they grow over the next decades, those problems […]
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The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is absolute nerdy chaos. Some 180,000 or more attendees are there to see hundreds or thousands of exhibitors all promising the next big thing in technology. Ultimately, the world may never see what the breathless bloggers hail as the disruption to alter civilization as we know it, but there were still some pretty novel concepts for foodservice broadly. Picnic’s Pizza Assembly Bot First, of course, the pizza robot! Built by the automation company Picnic, its new bot is a bit of a misnomer. It’s more […]
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A facial recognition company is starting with the restaurant industry in its quest to break consumers free of the tyranny of pulling out purses, wallets or phones to pay for things. For hungry consumers, the claimed benefits are speedier transactions and instant access to loyalty accounts, while restaurants and retailers are being sold on faster kiosk throughput and lower credit card processing fees. A subsidiary of tech-focused restaurant brand Cali Group, which is also an investor in Kitchen United, PopID is looking to replicate what’s happened with the fast adoption […]
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As it works through a new restaurant design, Chipotle is testing new walk-up and drive-thru windows for digital orders and pickups. According to a CNBC article, the burrito giant will open around 80 restaurants with “Chipotlanes,” which is what they’re calling their drive-thru pickup lanes. It’s adding pick-up windows to new locations as well, but it’s not clear how many locations will include such windows. Many legacy locations already have pick-up windows, intended initially for take-out orders, but the company shuttered numerous ones around the time traffic plummeted during a […]
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There’s no shortage of innovative autonomous-vehicle companies out there, from Starship rolling around the sidewalks of college campuses and Washington, D.C., to Nuro delivering groceries in on-the-road vehicles. But REV, developed by Refraction AI, fits right between those models, figuratively and literally. The five-foot tall, four-foot long vehicles are designed to drive at top speeds of 15 miles per hour and operate for 12 hours on a single charge. It’s a lot like other autonomous operations, as the vehicle arrives and alerts a restaurant, the staff punches in a code […]
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MyValue365.com, a Chicago-based ethnic grocery ordering and delivery company that’s previously focused on at-home consumers, announced its entry into B2B grocery-delivery business, which includes deliveries to restaurants. This offering is a part of the company’s new wholesale business arm catering to increased requests from restaurants to get higher quality groceries delivered directly to their place of business. “All the restaurants that have reached out to us typically order groceries from four to five different suppliers on a weekly, and sometimes even daily, basis, said the company founders in a press […]
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