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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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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